


Helicobacter

by apparitionism



Category: Warehouse 13
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-04
Updated: 2020-09-26
Packaged: 2020-10-06 19:57:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 57,574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20512622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apparitionism/pseuds/apparitionism
Summary: Someone named “Helena” and someone named “Myka” happen to meet, happen to click in unexpected ways, and happen to encounter obstacles to exploring said clicking. Will these two crazy kids find a way to work things out? Well... this is a (very romantic) comedy, so let’s hope so. It’s about urban planning and medicine and fake engagements and koans and a lot of other things, including various flora and fauna and what the universe has in mind for each of us. As I’ve said before to kick off a story or two: now let’s have some fun.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Nothing in particular is driving this new and pointless exercise in AU foolishness, other than the fact that Joanne Kelly was on that Resident show, playing that blond boy’s ex-fiancée. I’m treating this a little like my (non-AU) [“Hockey"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1752482/chapters/3745220) story, which took from Warehouse the fact of a hockey player, a retrieval in Toronto, and basically nothing else. Here, I’m taking blond-boy ex-fiancé (played by that kid if you want, but feel free to imagine otherwise) who is a resident at a hospital, plus some JK-played character having a medical emergency. That’s it. I’m changing the name of the ex-fiancé resident from his show name, just because I can. The JK-played character is now named “Myka,” for the sake of convenience. Also conveniently, there’s a JM-played character named “Helena,” and maybe a couple other people who coincidentally bear some familiar names. (Not everybody.) I was originally going to call this “Tropology,” because it does partake of some familiar devices, but I’ve decided to save that title for something else down the line. Anyway, this is going to be pretty brainless, but maybe amusing here and there… I’ve had about 20 minutes a day to work on non-work writing lately, so this is what you get.

A hellscape: blood everywhere, coating the office buildings, apartments, streets, sidewalks, the park with its capacious square and inviting fountain…

“Oh god,” said Myka Bering. She coughed, a weak, wet spasm.

A nonplussed Helena Wells gaped at her. Then she found her voice: “Oh god,” she echoed, as she registered fully what had just happened: Myka Bering had vomited what seemed to be an entire digestive tract full of blood and other fluids onto Helena’s conference table. All over the 1:1250 scale model of the neighborhood redesign that this meeting between them—commenced barely a moment ago, with a handshake and an exchange of introductory pleasantries—was intended to discuss.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” Myka Bering was mumbling, even as she sagged over the table, clearly trying to keep herself from repeating the performance, and just as clearly unable to hold herself up without the table’s help.

Helena grabbed her phone from that same tabletop, wiped it on her sleeve, and stabbed at 9, then 1, then 1. She thought very little beyond rhyming each chant of “sorry” with an echo in her own mind of “get help”…

The scene blurred with astonishing rapidity into a chaos of paramedics and their work, with Helena’s dumbfounded employees congregating in the hallway, voicing their own “oh god” utterances as Myka Bering was wheeled down that hallway on a gurney, all while Helena ran alongside, yelling to her assistant, Steve, “Call her office at City Hall, find someone she knows, then start dealing with the conference room!” She might have spared half a thought for tasking the fastidious Steve with the first pass at the mess, but the supine, barely lucid woman beside her was still alternating “oh god” with “sorry,” occasionally interspersed with “your model.” Helena tried to tell her to calm down and be quiet, that no one at all would ever care about this morning or this meeting, and the model was already forgotten. (It wasn’t. It had cost a pretty penny, and Helena had no idea where she would find the budget to replace it—if, after this morning, she were still in the running for the contract at all.)

They loaded Myka into the ambulance, and as the EMT in the back with her began to reach for the rear door, to pull it shut, Helena had a thought: surely some positive feeling might attach to someone who kept a city employee—a decision-making, or at least recommendation-making, city employee—company in her hour of need?

A pale, sick face regarded her. “I’m sorry,” Helena heard again, and the needful note in it compelled her to lever herself into the vehicle. As she followed that impulse, three things happened in rapid succession: the EMT yelped “Hey!”, Myka turned her head and threw up again—not as much blood, but enough to cover most of the real estate that was Helena’s clothing—and then Myka’s eyes rolled back in her head.

“What’s happened?” Helena demanded of the paramedic.

The young woman said, “Your own dumb fault; you aren’t even supposed to be back here.”

“Is she breathing?”

Now the paramedic ignored Helena; she worked calmly, attending to pulse, respiration, pupils. “She fainted,” was the verdict. “You related to her?”

“What difference does that make?”

“HIPAA. Privacy. Big public health crackdown—_everything_ crackdown since that new mayor got sworn in last month, but all I care about is if this lady files a stupid lawsuit that gets me fired. And like I said, you should be up front with my partner, but if you’re related? That’d cover my ass, both ways.”

_Say yes,_ Helena’s gut instructed her, _say she is your wife or your sister or your cousin or_—but she hesitated, an uncharacteristic moment of doubt, and the woman read that moment correctly: “You can’t cover my ass,” she said. “Either way.”

“She was in my office for a meeting,” Helena admitted. “Our first meeting. We’d said hello, and then… this.”

“Then you’re out of luck.”

That set Helena seething. “We are in an ambulance and I am covered in her blood and you refuse to tell me what’s wrong with her? Any lawsuit the city found problematic in the past will _pale in comparison_ to the one that I will file!” She was bluffing. She had no desire to antagonize any part of the municipality—not again. Not now.

“You a lawyer? If not, you don’t scare me. You’re the city’s problem.”

“I am an architect! But I have outstanding representation!” Also a bluff. Steve’s boyfriend, an overworked associate at a smaller firm, had graciously agreed to look over Helena’s contracts when he could, but he would not have been able to spare the time to take her on as an actual client. Even if he had, she would have had to scramble to pay him.

“Anyway we’re here, so now you can take it out on the hospital. Unless she’s got Ebola or something. Then I might see you later on, in quarantine.”

That had not even begun to occur to Helena, and her shock at the idea must have shown in her face, for the paramedic said, “Nah, you won’t have the pleasure. She’d be running a fever. Probably would’ve been too sick to get to your meeting at all.”

Their meeting… it had been their meeting, in a literal sense, but their introduction as such had come nearly a month earlier, when Myka was put in charge of the neighborhood project—replacing a thoroughly distasteful, offensive man who, during _his_ first meeting with Helena, had suggested that she could be awarded the contract on the spot if she were to “award _this_ contract, if you know what I mean,” and she hadn’t wasted an instant on considering her next action (or its consequences): she had kneed him in that contract. She’d blustered her way forward, complaining loudly to City Hall before his version of the encounter, however he close to present it, could solidify as reality—and she’d succeeded. He lost his job. Helena was quite honestly surprised, for the administration in power at the time, the one whose head had now left office, had indeed been notorious for ethical lapses and abuses of all sorts.

At that point, a clearly overworked Myka had had the neighborhood renewal thrust upon her. First, she and Helena had had a terse email exchange. Next came a slightly more cordial telephone conversation. Then a few more telephone calls, but mainly emails, as three firms, Helena’s among them, cleared the first round of bidding on the redesign.

She had been determined from the beginning to emerge victorious, for as she had told Steve, and only Steve, the business… well, in terms of the business, it would make life so much easier to win a large, prestigious contract. “Only you,” he’d said, “would think that taking on a project an order of magnitude bigger than anything you’ve ever done before would make life _easier_.” He was laughing at her, even as he agreed that more money could certainly be put to good use, even, perhaps, on raises for him and everyone else at the firm, all of whose lives would become so much _easier_.

Right after the ill-considered kneeing, however, he was not laughing. He was asking, “Why do you have to next-level everything? Did you think _this_ would make your life easier? In any of the weird ways you think that works? What if he presses charges? You said yourself that you didn’t feel threatened.”

“No,” Helena affirmed. “Angry, but not threatened.”

“And you know I’m not saying you’re in the wrong. But what if your complaint doesn’t do anything? What if they just cut us out of the process? You know how that place works… did you think about that at all?”

She had not thought about that at all, but: “Everything will be fine,” she’d told him.

And it was, but: “_This_ time,” Steve had warned. But he’d added, to soften the admonition, “I’m the redhead; I’m supposed to have the temper. You’re the calm, cool British lady.”

A less accurate identification of their temperaments there could not have been…. but in any event, Helena resolved to act with a great deal more of that mythical calm and cool so as to do everything completely correctly, going forward. In all communications, she maintained a tone and touch as light as possible, for when Myka Bering thought “Helena Wells,” she should feel a sense of relief at how little trouble Helena ever caused her—what a respite, in fact, Helena represented, certainly in comparison to those other demanding potential contractors. Yet Helena also took care never to slide into obsequiousness. She had surmised that Myka, surrounded by so much politics and so many politicians, would most likely sniff out any too-blatant flattery or deference. So Helena aimed for—at most—friendly. Amusing. Engaging.

It helped that Myka herself was engaging. Amusing. Friendly, even, once Helena had taken care to navigate their interactions far, far away from the situation’s initial awkwardness.

Myka’s good qualities seemed to be innate, but Helena felt compelled to work at conveying her own. To provide backbone to the undertaking, she researched Myka. This task, she might have delegated to Steve, but there was no telling what detail he might inadvertently skip over that could be useful. For a public employee, however, Myka wasn’t very… public. Every available datum was professional, and even those data were limited. A LinkedIn profile, much neglected, told Helena only that Myka had begun working for this city upon her move to it from Colorado, four years prior. A Twitter account, too, existed, although that must have been required by the city… Myka had liked no tweets, had replied to none, had tweeted nothing herself, and had retweeted one piece of information, two years ago, in the middle of winter: a link to the city’s snowplow route map. The one interesting note was that she followed—in addition to the mayor, the deputy mayor, the city council, and the city planning office—thirty-two accounts related to books.

Other than that rather useful, and quite tantalizing, bit of Twitter information, however, Helena found nothing but a few news photographs of official city events that included, in their L-to-R identifications, “Myka Bering, planning administrator.” Judging from those photographs, and adjusting for their unflattering documentary quality, Myka Bering was pretty. Also taller than many of her coworkers. Beyond that…

On meeting her, Helena had thought to condemn those few photographs for withholding quite pertinent information, for nothing about them had prepared her for the delicate physicality of this tall person—incongruously tall, not small, as delicacy usually manifested—who extended toward Helena a fine-boned hand. _She is exquisite_, Helena had thought, in that first instant of their touching, as she held Myka’s fine-boned hand in hers. _Physically exquisite_.

But in the next instant, of course, she was physically… not exquisite.

The arrival in the hospital involved fast movement through the waiting room into a space of examination, and Helena was relieved to see Myka’s eyes open, hear her ask what was happening. Helena moved along quietly in the background, because she, too, _wanted to know_. One doctor, or nurse, or someone, gave Helena a look and demanded, “Are you all right for now? Stable?” This baffled Helena for the briefest of moments, but then she realized: the blood. She nodded, the someone nodded back, and Helena was allowed, however inappropriately, to continue to stand in the room.

That had not been the doctor, for when a blond man strode in, it became clear that _he_ was the doctor, or at the very least _a_ doctor: deference ensued. Helena, not much for deference, merely continued to stand.

The doctor looked at the patient. “Oh my god,” he said. “Myka?” _That_ certainly got Helena’s attention.

“Rick?” Myka responded, and an expression of recognition, mixed with something Helena could not identify, enlivened her face, just for one moment. Then she fainted again.

Helena’s first impression of this “Rick” was that there was something akin to elfin about him—but no, not small like that, for he was not short; rather, he was delicate, fine. Like Myka, in fact, delicate in that way that no photo would take it upon itself to convey. They were near matches in their gently overchiseled faces, their perfect pearl-joint bodies, Myka and this doctor whom she knew. Who knew her. And Helena felt a completely unwarranted stab of exclusion from, even jealousy of, this acquainted, matched set.

But that thought of rhymed delicacy made Helena aware that in this moment Myka seemed not delicate but far too fragile. Her skin, pearlescent before she lost the blood, had become cindery.

“What is wrong with her?” Helena asked, because Myka could not ask for herself.

This “Rick” turned to Helena. “I’m sorry, who are you? And why are you in here?”

“I am Helena Wells, and I am in here because I want to know what is wrong with her.”

“Look, I know you’re not related to her, so I couldn’t tell you, even if I knew what’s wrong. If you’re not hurt, go to the waiting area and wait.”

“What is this fixation on kinship?” she demanded. “One human being can have concern for another without sharing DNA!”

“Privacy,” she was unsurprised to hear him say, yet slightly surprised to hear him go on, “and Myka’s pretty private.”

“I know that,” Helena said, recalling the lack of public data. “But what makes you such an authority? Just because you’ve met before?”

He began to laugh. “_Met_ before? We were engaged.”

This, Helena was enormously surprised to hear. And inexplicably _annoyed_ to hear. Her frustration shuffled, shifted, and she delivered her next words with as little thought as she had devoted to that groin-kneeing: “_Were_? She and I _are_.” The statement was preceded by none of the hesitation that had doomed her in the ambulance, and she applauded herself internally for the performance.

She was gratified by his own expression of surprise: a double-take blink, followed by comically raised eyebrows and an open mouth. “What? That isn’t true. It can’t be.”

Helena snapped, “You are no one to tell me what can or cannot be true.”

He moved his mouth as if to speak again, but some monitor connected to Myka made a noise, and he turned back to her. Helena was relieved on several levels. She was also, now, appalled at herself. For the performance. If Steve ever found out about this, he would kill her… no, the hyperbole didn’t fit. He would shake his head, and Helena would know that he was worried about his livelihood, hers, and that of everyone else with whom they worked. _Take it back; take it back right now_, she told herself. _You want to make him the bigger fool, but eventually you will be shown up as that fool. Take it back. _

But second on second ticked by, and she did not take it back. She watched the medical team work, work on this woman about whom she had told a lie, and she did not take that lie back.

So much for completely right, going forward.

TBC

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> original tumblr tags: I can't stress strongly enough that the primary purpose here is to keep my wheels turning, so if it's not interesting to you, that's fine, but I can promise the following:, some silliness, some confusion, NO DYING, (I promise Myka's going to be fine), lots of sugar, Helena thinking that she is in control of events, Helena being mistaken about that, quite frankly those last two are probably my favorites, (also there will be lots of talking because of course), in all seriousness my work life is out of control, which is why I've been so silent, and while the work stuff isn't going to abate at all, there's something to be said for that 20 minutes of Bering and Wells every day


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My tumblr summary of what happened to kick this tale off went like so: Myka and Helena met in person for the first time, Myka coughed up blood all over everything including Helena, Myka’s ex-fiancé (sort of from The Resident) was discovered to be working at the hospital where she was taken after this blood-coughing incident, and finally Helena, in a fit of being herself, pronounced that she and out-cold Myka were in fact engaged to each other, so take that, blond doctor-guy who thinks he knows everything. (A lot of people are going to think they know things, here in this tale. A lot of them are going to be somewhat mistaken.)

When the still-unconscious Myka was officially admitted to the hospital—when, at that point, she was taken away for more procedures—Helena was indeed banished to a waiting room, with no indication as to when she might see her not-fiancée again.

She paced. She thought about illness and blood and neighborhoods and destruction. Thought about what an idiot she was. Thought that she could not see a resolution to this situation, this result of her idiocy, that did not involve some destruction of its own.

After a time, a very sweet older male nurse came to fetch Helena. He caught her arm in a large, gentle paw as she was about to commence what would have been her twenty-third march past a long bank of unoccupied chairs. His first words to her were, “Don’t worry so hard, honey.”

Sage advice, but Helena thought she should not take it. “Worry far harder”: those would have been more-useful words for someone to deliver. Worry far harder, and apply that pressure _in advance_. Before saying ridiculous words that created new problems.

In Myka’s room, Helena approached the bedside with trepidation. “Hi,” Myka said. She looked better, which Helena noted aloud, and Myka informed her, “I got a blood transfusion. To make up for what I…” She gestured at Helena’s still-bloody clothes. “And the model.” A little wince.

“Please don’t think about that,” Helena said. Then she inhaled: a conscious preparation. Better to come clean quickly, before there could be any too-serious repercussions. “I may have told a small untruth,” she began, and she was astonished to see Myka smile.

She was further taken aback when Myka said, “Have we set a date?”

All Helena could get out was, “He told you.”

“What actually happened was, he demanded that I tell him it wasn’t true.”

_This time_, Helena heard Steve say again, with its implied corollary, _but what about the next?_ Was this to be the ill-fated next? “I’m so, so sorry. You shouldn’t have been subjected to an interrogation because of my… conceit. I assume he was reassured to find out the truth?”

Myka still wore a strange, satisfied near-smile. “No, no, I played along.”

“Why would you do that?”

“He wanted really bad for you to have been lying.”

“I gathered that.”

“And if he wants something, I’m not inclined to let him have it. Whatever it is.”

Interesting. “So we’re engaged.”

“We are. If _you_ don’t mind playing along for a little while?”

So hopeful, so shiny and positive. Even in the face of this… situation, and Helena couldn’t help smiling too. “I’m just sorry I haven’t proposed properly, with a ring, as yet,” she said. She touched Myka’s left hand where it lay on the bed. It wasn’t warm—no fever, thus testifying to no Ebola—but it was soft. A moment full of that softness passed before Helena registered that she hadn’t relinquished it, that her touch had not been momentary, as she’d intended. She moved her hand back to her lap. “And you may tell him I’ve said so. That I’ve said so over and over, if it helps.”

“Don’t beat yourself up. I haven’t bought you a ring either, so I’m just as sorry. What I’ll tell him is, we both know there’s plenty of time for that—I mean, I hope there will be.”

“You hope? What?” She didn’t know what Myka had learned about her condition… so was that _dread_ that Helena felt scuttling through her chest? Surely they hadn’t been meant to meet so that Helena could help bring her to bad news?

Myka cleared her throat. The action, though not at all vigorous, clearly pained her. “They still don’t know exactly what’s wrong, so Rick says they’ll do more tests. I guess I can say that the one good thing about Rick is, he’s a really dedicated doctor.”

“How long ago were you… ah… together? If that isn’t too personal a question.”

“You’re wearing my bodily fluids, plus we’re co-conspirators. ‘Too personal’ is pretty much off the table.” Another tiny almost-grin. These lip-twist variations that Myka tended to deploy… did she know how attractive they were on her? Even in this somewhat beauty-compromised state? In fact Helena was just a bit thankful—perversely so—that she wasn’t being subjected to them in her conference room. How would she have concentrated? Myka’s latest smile faded, however, as she went on, “It ended when he was in medical school. A real classic: I had a job, was supporting us. Then… I guess he started looking toward the end of the school road, and I wasn’t on it. My parents were devastated.”

“Because you were yourself devastated?”

“No. Because they loved him—they still do. He and I were kids together, and our families were close. But I haven’t seen him since we broke up. I didn’t even know he was doing his residency here. How’s that for a clean break? But I’m amazed my mother didn’t tell me; she and my dad are still friendly with his parents.”

“Perhaps she was hoping for a chance meeting like this.”

“A chance meeting like _this_? I doubt it.”

“It’s very romantic,” Helena said, though she was not pleased by how true it sounded, once she had. “He may be saving your life, or could depict himself as having done, depending on how serious this is. Is your mother the type to sigh and say words about destiny?”

“That’s… uncanny. Are you sure you’ve never met her?”

“I would have no idea, would I?”

“I guess not.” Myka paused. “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about her. She’s a really good person, if you can get past things like the sighing and the saying of words about destiny.”

Helena already had an idea, and it did not seem wrong. “One would also have to get past her fondness for your former fiancé,” she said.

“Okay, that too. Honestly, the timing. I really did think she’d finally come to terms.”

“Well. Fortunately, you have me now.”

Helena was joking. But Myka nodded and echoed, with solemnity, “Fortunately.”

****

Helena left Myka’s room to seek coffee, because Myka’s eyelids had drooped, leading Helena’s to do so as well, but of course Myka was in a bed and Helena was not. She stood beside a vending machine in the waiting area, sipped, and hoped to reawaken from the sagging aftermath of the emergency’s adrenaline wash. “Hey,” she heard a vaguely familiar voice say.

Rick. He was smiling, as if he and Helena were not adversaries. “So I was talking to an EMT,” he said.

Condescending snot. “And?” Helena prompted.

“Turns out she brought Myka in. And you.”

_Tiresome_ condescending snot. “And?”

“You two got engaged awfully fast.” Now his smile became a smirk. Had they been in a room with ready-to-hand surgical implements, Helena would have attempted to seize one and disembowel him.

“Do not tell Myka that you know the truth,” she said, with as much force and threat as she could muster. “Do _not_. Among things she should have to deal with, your gloating is _not_.”

“I wouldn’t gloat.” Defensive.

“You were certainly gloating as you confronted me just now. And further, if you are so unlikely to do that, then why didn’t she correct the record when she had the chance? Why didn’t she tell you it wasn’t true?”

Rick gazed at her. Delicately. “Okay,” he said, after that lengthy, delicate gaze. “You win.” He had a strange way of positioning his thin top lip, whenever he spoke, as if hiding his upper teeth. It didn’t incline Helena to trust him.

“I don’t care about winning,” she said, and she was surprised to find, having said it, that she meant it. “I care that someone is ill, and your job is to make her well. Your job is _not_ to prove that she’s failed to put one over on you.”

“If that EMT’s right, you don’t even know her.” He gave an inquisitive capuchin-monkey tilt and push to his head, and Helena thought, despite herself, _He is an oddly attractive animal_. Then he asked, “Is this what you’re like all the time?”

Helena said what was true: “No one who knows me would say yes to that.”

“Then why are you doing this now?”

This time, Helena didn’t answer.

“Emergencies are weird,” he said with a shrug, one that she wanted to, but could not quite, read as dismissive. “People do all kinds of things they never thought they would. Or could.”

And Helena shrugged back at him. She could certainly match him for dismissiveness. “This isn’t exactly lifting a Volkswagen from a crash victim.”

“Maybe it’s your version,” Rick said. He walked away.

Helena wasn’t sure if she should, based on that comment, temper or maintain her instinctive loathing of him. Heroics notwithstanding, she certainly did feel that strange intimacy that emergencies could inspire… intensified, perhaps, because of this one’s involving only herself and Myka. Not a plane full of people, not a train. Not a populated building, classroom, courtroom. Only two people, bound by a sudden crisis. _And yet you did not lift a Volkswagen_, she reminded herself. _You did nothing but place a telephone call and climb into an ambulance. And then you told a lie._

A new voice said “hey” to her, and she turned around to be confronted by a strikingly lovely Asian woman in a business suit—a very fine suit, yet one that nevertheless struggled to match her loveliness. The woman looked down at her phone, then up at Helena. She turned the phone around to show Helena the screen. “That’s you,” she said.

Helena nodded. But hadn’t that picture been taken at an office party? How would that—but all became clear when the woman said, “I’m Abigail Chow. I work with Myka. Your assistant sent me this so I could find you without yelling for you and bothering people, though it’s pretty dead in here… whoops, probably shouldn’t say that in a hospital.” She looked Helena up and down. “What happened to you?”

Helena looked at her clothes. “Myka happened to me.”

“She stabbed you?” Abigail asked this as if it might have been a real possibility.

“This is her blood, not mine.”

“_You_ stabbed _her_?” Also as if it were a real possibility.

Helena ignored that. “Abigail Chow… weren’t you at one point intending to attend this morning’s meeting?”

“Something more important came up. I thought so, anyway.”

“In a way I suppose it did,” Helena said. “Violently up. She vomited blood, and then did so again, and then fainted… do you have any idea what could be the matter? Has she been ill?”

“She’s got your average overworked-bureaucrat issues—other people keep candy in a bowl on the desk; Myka keeps antacids. Sugar-free antacids, because god forbid that that Spartan take one step down the slippery slope to decadence. ‘I can handle it’ is the song she sings. She handles too little sleep, too much anxiety… but I’ll tell you—non-Spartan to non-Spartan, because I like my creature comforts and I can see that you do too, given that even all bloody you’ve got a sort of louche slink to you—she was definitely worked up about your meeting this morning.”

“And yet you left her to handle it alone!” Helena accused, with a vehemence that she hoped would cover how flattered she was by the idea that she would make someone consider, and then deem appropriate to say, the phrase “louche slink.”

“I told you, I had another thing to do. Look, will they let me see her?”

“Most likely, unless she’s undergoing more tests. But—one thing.”

“What one thing?”

Helena gathered herself. “She and I are engaged.”

“Engaged in what?”

“In an engagement.”

Abigail lifted one edge of her mouth, not quite in a sneer, but as if to suggest that what she was about to say was _clearly_ a joke. “The kind with ‘I do’ at the end of it?”

Helena nodded, and she noted that Abigail’s facial expression did not change overmuch at the “news.” Instead, she crossed her arms and leaned back a bit, a _go on_ posture. Helena said, “It’s a rather long story, one that I confess I stepped into without considering what I was doing. Myka’s ex-fiancé is one of the residents here, as it happens—one of the doctors working on her, in fact, and he was very presumptuous about her. I realize it’s ridiculous to say this, given that I’ve known her all of five minutes, but… it got my back up.”

The other edge of Abigail’s mouth lifted, turning the not-quite sneer into an actual smile. “I’ve known _you_ all of five minutes, but I’d bet that’s not hard to do.”

Helena had to smile too. “You’re quite discerning. So I…”

“Ha! You said _you_ were engaged to her. Excellent move. But _nuts_.”

“I’m not known for my restraint. In this case, it’s also helped me pry at least some information out of the staff here. The relationship status has, that is.”

“So probably not the worst thing you could’ve done.”

“It seemed to amuse Myka, at the very least, and she decided she wanted to maintain it, as a charade.”

“For his benefit. Or, I guess, hers… I like it.” Abigail chuckled, a sound of latent evil, and Helena decided she enjoyed Abigail. She pulled back on that a bit when Abigail said, “You know, you really do look like somebody stabbed you. And I bet you crunch when you walk.”

The dried blood did make Helena’s movement in her trousers somewhat… challenging. “A kind nurse offered me clean scrubs,” she said, “but my assistant will ideally appear at some point to take me home. I’ll change and get back to work.”

“But you can’t leave.”

“Can’t leave?” Helena repeated, baffled.

“The person she’s engaged to wouldn’t just leave. And double wouldn’t, not if it left her alone with the person she _used to be_ engaged to.”

Helena, chagrined that she had not understood this immediately, could manage only, “Oh.”

“So you’ll probably need those scrubs after all.”

“Would she like me to be observably jealous, do you think?” Helena asked, with a bit of hope. Some pleasure could surely be found in making Rick watch that, even if he would know it was only for show.

That earned her a chortle. “Maybe a little. Or more likely a lot? I haven’t heard a ton about the ex, but she never seemed to be a huge fan. And given that she’s into playing this engaged-to-you game… she might also be into forcing him to watch her reassure you that she doesn’t have feelings for him. How’d the meeting go, anyway?”

“Briefly. It went briefly. She said ‘hello.’ I said something like ‘At last we meet.’ Because we’d been joking a bit about it, over email, and—”

“_You’re_ the pen pal?”

“What?”

“She’d been getting a little moony about her emails with somebody. I thought she meant on some dating site, even though that would’ve been totally out of character. But you never know, these days.”

Helena was not certain how she should feel about Abigail’s depiction of how Myka had felt, or rather how Myka had performed her feelings, about their correspondence. Of course Helena had been trying to exert some influence, and if that had been the result… well, at least a charm offensive, unlike architectural models, cost nothing.

When she showed Abigail to Myka’s room, Helena was pleased to see that Myka seemed pleased to see Abigail. She was pleased also to see that the way Abigail shook her head at her coworker suggested a nonjudgmental, even caring, reproof. “Hey, you,” Abigail said, “what did you do to yourself?”

Helena had planned to absent herself entirely, to let them speak together as people who actually knew each other would if no stranger were present… but she lingered in the hallway, just beyond the door. Eavesdropping, and she told herself it was for insight. Possibly for leverage. For some useful purpose, at any rate.

“Too much fast living,” Myka said, in response to Abigail’s question. Her voice was a bit weak, Helena noted. Still tired, but bucking up—no doubt to show the best face to her friend.

“That might be true, but I’m not sure when you’d fit it in. I’ve never beat you to the office, any morning ever, and I’ve known you for how many years? They figure out what’s wrong yet?”

“Not really. Something digestive.”

Abigail laughed. “Got that. From the fact that you took it out—took it all out, as far as I could tell—on that architect.”

“I hate myself,” Myka said, and her tone made Helena want to rush in and reassure her.

“I bet you didn’t do it on purpose. Although, impressive if you could. Think of those time-waste-y meetings you could put a stop to.”

“I didn’t want to stop that one.”

“I heard you weren’t in it very long. How would you have known you wanted it to keep going?”

“Well…” Myka began, but then she gave up: “Fine. Point taken. I wasn’t in it long enough to know anything.”

They were quiet for a moment, leaving Helena to speculate on facial expressions… she could imagine Myka smiling. She could not, however, have imagined Abigail’s next words, which were delivered as a tease: “Don’t play it off, Bering. I bet you knew _something_ the minute you laid eyes on her. She’s good-looking, that architect you threw up on.”

“I’m so embarrassed. If I weren’t already sick, I’d feel sick about it.”

And again Helena wanted to rush in to reassure Myka that she should not feel embarrassed or sick or anything else, but someone tapped her on the shoulder. She turned to see the sweet nurse. “You change your mind about the scrubs?” he asked.

Helena looked back toward the room. Even if Abigail hadn’t brought up that very good reason not to leave, Helena most likely would not have been able to bring herself, in the event, to add to Myka’s uncertainties by disappearing. Besides, any conviction that she must stay was surely motivated primarily by the idea that she was improving her chances of achieving her professional goal.

“I did change my mind,” she told the nurse. “Thank you.”

TBC

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> original tumblr tags: I love a (nonserious) situation in which somebody has to play along, but you can see things are already getting a bit layered here, if you keep reading this story you might want to keep track of what each character knows, I mean insofar as that's possible given that we won't be deviating from a Helena-centric perspective, I confess I find her head voice soothing, at least in an AU context, because show-Helena is a little too difficult for me to put together as a real thinking character, unless I aggressively ignore one aspect or another, I can put words in her mouth in a TV-show-dialogue sense, but thoughts in her head?, that's entirely different, anyway the upshot is, I take comfort in a Helena who is a little formal with herself


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bering and Wells will never not be the best fandom. I myself am still here because I continue to think that JM and JK would be well matched in several different sorts of narratives, and I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t be the one to write some of them—even if I technically have better (if only in the sense of “remunerated”) things to do, and even if a few of the narratives I produce, such as this one, aren’t fully baked. So, like, onward. In part 1 and part 2, some dominoes were set up, some motifs were introduced, and some all-around foolishness occurred. More of that will happen in this part.

When Helena returned to the room after exchanging her clothes for scrubs of vivid (and extremely unflattering) magenta, Abigail was gone. Myka’s eyes were closed. Helena made to tiptoe back out again and let her sleep, but Myka must have sensed her presence. She opened her eyes and said, “You’re still here.”

“I wouldn’t leave my fiancée,” Helena told her.

Myka blinked. “I hadn’t even thought of that.”

“I hadn’t either.” A pathetic admission. “Your friend Abigail made the point.”

“I’m sorry. You should go; I’ll tell Rick everything.”

“_You’re_ sorry? I’m the one who created the situation. In any event, you said you don’t want to give him what he wants, and if you don’t want to, then you should not have to.”

“No, I really am sorry. Because I created the first situation that led to you creating this other situation, because of whatever it is that’s wrong with me.”

“Finding out what is wrong with you is all that matters. And fixing it, of course. How do you feel?”

“Like I’m living through a nightmare,” Myka sighed.

“No doubt the uncertainty—”

“No, I mean literally, like I lived out an anxiety dream. Where you show up to a meeting to look at something and cough up a bunch of blood on it.”

“I can say with certainty that I have never had that particular anxiety dream.”

“I’m pretty sure it’s the one I’m going to be having from now on. Way more dramatic than having to take a final exam for a class I’ve never gone to.”

“Mine usually involve being unable to find a vital item.” _Reveal something_, some intuition within Helena said, and she offered, “As a child I had nightmares about lobsters.”

Helena was pleased to have heeded her impulse in this case, for Myka’s deadpan blink in response was priceless. “Lobsters,” she echoed.

“I’d seen them only in pictures. They’re large and have claws.”

“Do you eat them? Now?”

Not the question Helena had expected, but she answered, truthfully, “Heavens no. I’d have to look at them, and they’re still large and have claws.”

“I’d think you would, though. For the revenge.”

“No thank you. If I tried to avenge myself for the dreams, they’d just reinvade the dreams.”

Another priceless blink. “I don’t think that’s how dreams work.”

“Then perhaps you’ll be spared the reliving, or re-dreaming, of today’s nightmare. Let’s hope so, at any rate.” Regarding her, Helena thought that she should be spared nightmares, today’s or those of any other day, if only to ensure that that restful smile would continue to soften her face.

Her exhausted face… sleep might have been imminent, but instead Myka said, in a mumble, “You look terrible.”

Helena smiled. “What an awful thing to say. What if this is how I look all the time?”

“It isn’t. I remember a little from this morning.”

“You look terrible also, by the way,” Helena said, but she continued to smile.

“I hope this isn’t how I look all the time.”

“There’s a distinct difference between this morning and now. Wardrobe, at the very least.”

“Your wardrobe too. I’m glad you aren’t bloody anymore… although I guess I couldn’t tell if you were. Is that the point of that color that looks so bad on you? You shouldn’t wear it ever again…” Myka’s eyes closed, They remained closed for one beat, two, three, but then they opened once more.

“The scrubs are hideous,” Helena acknowledged, and she was mildly surprised that she was taking no offense at Myka’s criticism, valid though it was, “yet comfortable. Perhaps I’ll institute a new dress code at the firm…” But Myka’s eyes had closed definitively now. This time, Helena’s withdrawal from the room was successful.

****

Steve’s arrival in the waiting area came as a relief, and Helena told him, “You’re a blessedly normal sight. Although quite frankly I don’t see how this day could become any _more_ bizarre.”

“Why do you say things like that out loud?” he asked. “The last time you said something like that out loud, you ended up having to add flying buttresses to all ten branches of that savings and loan.”

“It wasn’t _your_ problem.”

“It felt like my problem when you complained about it for the entire three weeks it took to make it happen. Is this going to be like that?” He sounded tranquil. A flat calm was the result whenever he worked to even his breathing, and it had taken Helena some time to understand that when he spoke in that manner, he was attempting to calm himself, not her. She had originally been offended, thinking that he sought to manage her; now, however, all she felt was guilt for having agitated him anew.

“This is already like nothing else in my experience,” she said.

“So let’s get it back to normal. Leave the buttresses here and get back to the office.”

“About that,” Helena said. “Well. Interestingly: no.”

“Did you just say ‘no’? About going to work?”

He was going to start breathing extremely mindfully any second, which Helena tried to forestall by explaining the situation as reasonably as she could… although any explanation that involved the words “spontaneous false engagement” was most likely by definition unreasonable. At the end of it, he was regarding her with puzzlement, so she tried, “Consider this: the situation might—possibly—increase the chances of our bid being chosen. My being solicitous, that is. Of my faux fiancée. Or would that be fausse fiancée? At any rate, solicitous of _her_.”

“Oh thank god,” Steve said.

That was not what Helena had expected to hear him say, nor the tone in which she had expected to hear him say anything.

Steve went on, “For a minute I thought maybe you really were engaged to her. Some secret engagement that you were trying to tell me some fake story about, because maybe if _that_ had happened I could see you feeling like you actually needed to hang around. Wearing an outfit that makes you look like you fell out of a brand-new can of purple Play-doh. But even then it’d be a stretch; it isn’t hard to imagine you in my ear on the phone, begging me to find some work emergency that would get you out of this _other_ emergency.”

“Am I really that sort of monster?”

He clapped his palms together lightly. A gesture of rumination. “You’re a workaholic, not a monster,” he said. “I think you confuse the two.”

And yet they were the same thing, or at least they might as well have been, in Helena’s experience. “Well, for the moment, let’s not dwell on what you think. I want _her_ to think I am whatever sort of workaholic, or monster, or both or neither, who would do something decent for a fellow human being. Whatever sort, that is, who _is doing_ something decent for a fellow human being.”

“Is she going to believe that the millions of dollars riding on it have nothing to do with what you’re doing?”

“I suppose that’s down to me. To ensure that she believes it.” That was what she wanted Myka to believe. It was—but it was not the way she wanted Myka to believe it. “Go on then,” she told Steve. “You keep the office running, and I’ll… keep doing whatever it is I’m doing.”

“You’re keeping the office running,” Steve said. “Ideally.”

****

The next medical step for Myka was an endoscopy, which required sedation.

“Will you be here when I wake up?” Myka asked Helena, as Rick and other personnel were preparing to wheel her out of the room. She sounded more plaintive than she had before; even her first “sorry, sorry, sorry” seemed, in contrast, more self-possessed. Was her distress real? Or was it, given Rick’s presence, part of the performance?

It was a distinction without a difference, as far as Helena’s response was concerned. She said, “Of course I will,” a statement at which Rick rolled his eyes. Helena sneered at him, such that Myka couldn’t see. She leaned down, kissed Myka’s cheek—but she had not prepared herself for that new softness; had not prepared herself for the aftermath of having done it, either, not for Myka’s small smile, this one very intimate, nor for her own, equally intimate, in response. “When you wake up, I’ll be the first thing you see. Right here. The first thing you see.”

And indeed, not quite two hours later, Helena held Myka’s hand as she awakened. Her eyes opened, met Helena’s, then closed again.

She had green eyes, Myka did. Green eyes, an interest in books of many sorts, and a job in city planning. No one would be bowled over by those three facts about a person. No one.

Helena held the green-eyed, book-loving city planner’s hand and watched her fall back into sleep.

****

Myka woke a few times more over the next hours, but only briefly. She napped, and Helena sat beside the bed and watched her do it. She might have gone for coffee again, but for the fact that every time Myka did wake, she gripped Helena’s hand anew, as if to be reassured that it was all right to continue sleeping. Helena would nod, and Myka’s eyes would close.

Eventually, slowly, Myka fought her way back to full consciousness. Her throat was tender, so Helena fetched her a cup of ice chips. They sat quietly together, and it seemed only natural for their hands to remain joined.

Then Rick returned, to explain what had been gleaned from the procedure, and there was even more reason not to let go. Helena was actively not dwelling on the matter of this most creaturely of comforts as Rick began, “You have what’s called MALToma.”

Myka said, soft, “Anything –oma is bad.”

“You’re not wrong,” he said. “But this is one of the least bad: mucosa-associated lymphoid tissue lymphoma. The stomach’s a mucosal site, so that’s where you see most of these. We had to take a ton of biopsies during the endoscopy because it’s hard to diagnose… anyway, you have these lesions. And they’re what caused the hemorrhage, but that’s also what I think helped us catch this now, instead of down the line. The lesions might have turned out to be just ulcers, but the biopsies show otherwise—like with ulcers, though, H. pylori, the bacterium, tends to be the cause.”

Helena had to admit, at least to herself, that he was not overly unpleasant in his… _tone_. She shied from thinking the phrase _bedside manner_, but she was unsure as to why. Perhaps only because he was at the foot of the bed, not beside it; she herself was beside it. “Least bad,” she heard herself say. “How is it least bad.”

“We clear up the H. pylori infection, the cancer goes away. Ideally.”

“Ideally? What about nonideally?” Myka asked.

“Why don’t we get into that if it becomes necessary.”

So much for _not overly unpleasant_; Helena’s opinion swung violently back to _condescending snot_. “Why don’t we answer her question,” she snapped.

Myka said, “It’s okay.” After a slight pause, she added, “Honey.” Two people, now, had used that endearment with Helena, on this very strange day. A very strange phenomenon to tally, on a very strange day. “But I really would like to know,” Myka went on.

“Okay, I’ll tell you,” Rick said. As if he were making a grand concession. “It’s basically what you’d expect: the antibiotics don’t work, we move on to radiation. Then if _that_ doesn’t work, chemo, but look, treating the infection works most of the time. And if it doesn’t, one of the other approaches is almost guaranteed. This really is one of the least bad. I’m not trying to sugarcoat anything.”

“Thank you,” Myka said.

“Thank you,” Helena echoed. She glanced at Myka, then looked back at Rick, “I apologize.”

Rick ignored her. “Myka, we’ll start treatment right away—it’s two antibiotics, plus an acid reducer—and keep you till tomorrow to make sure we sealed up the bleeds during the endoscopy. You’ll be okay. Really.”

Myka was still clutching Helena’s hand, and Rick now glanced at that. “I guess you’ll want some… privacy,” he said.

His look and statement seemed to make Myka newly cognizant of the hand-holding; she released Helena as soon as he left the room. “Sorry about the death grip,” she said. “Is any circulation happening in your fingers?”

Helena held her hand up. Pale, but practically ruddy compared to the ghastly pallor of Myka’s face, pre-transfusion. She shook it once, twice. “All restored,” she reported. “I apologize, more sincerely to you than I did to him, for intruding into the discussion.”

“Advocacy,” Myka said. “I appreciated it. He might not have told me everything, and I did want to know.”

“You aren’t just saying that?”

“Would I lie to the woman I’m going to marry?”

“You don’t seem the type,” Helena said. “You’ll lie _about_ her, but not _to_ her.”

Myka laughed, then coughed, then said fast, “Don’t worry; no blood this time. Your jeans are safe… wait. How did I not notice you changed clothes again?”

“You’ve been a bit preoccupied. Also sedated.” Steve had returned, briefly, bearing non-scrub clothes for her, while the endoscopy was occurring. She’d changed in the restroom in a feverish hurry, lest she be absent when Myka was brought back—for even if Myka’s distress and Helena’s subsequent promise had been for show, it would certainly be important to maintain the show.

“What time is it?”

“Rather late at night, actually, so Rick’s saying you’re going home in the morning means it won’t be long at all now.”

“You should go.”

“I certainly will not. Unless…” Helena didn’t want to say what she was about to, but it seemed necessary. Necessarily solicitous. “Should someone be here who isn’t me? Family, or someone you’re seeing, even if you don’t happen to be engaged to marry that person?”

“My family doesn’t live here—and if Rick’s right, then flying them in, in some big hurry, wouldn’t make any sense. And as for the other thing, I… no. I work a lot. I guess I’m glad to know that the gastric distress wasn’t entirely because of the job. I thought I’d just been letting the stress get to me. That I should toughen up.”

_I can handle it_, Abigail had said was the song Myka sang. Helena had no trouble imagining Myka’s dogged certainty that any discomfort was her own fault. Eating antacids from her Spartan non-candy dish. Handling it. And all the while becoming more and more ill, ill with _cancer_… “You did sound so harried,” Helena said, as gently as she could. “Those times we spoke on the telephone.”

“So did you,” Myka noted softly.

Myka’s words were far more soothing than Helena imagined her own had sounded, which led her to protest, “No, no, you shouldn’t be trying to give me comfort. In reverse, that’s my job. Your job is to be healthy, to become more so by the day. By the hour.” But as she said it, it sounded too… intimate. Even for the strange situation into which Helena had inadvertently placed them, so she sought something else to say, something that would gesture properly toward what they were and were not. “I confess I looked you up on Twitter,” she said, and then wanted to kick herself. Why had a confession, a true one, been her gambit?

“That couldn’t have been very interesting. I just go there for links to book reviews—oh.” Helena’s heart sank at that “oh,” that “oh” of disillusionment. It continued to sink as Myka said what could not help but come next: “That’s why you started talking about books. In the emails. Isn’t it.”

All right, if everything unraveled, starting now, then it did. “Yes. It is. As long as I’m confessing. But I told you nothing that was untrue. And I did attend to what you told me. For example, I bought Wilson’s new translation of _The Odyssey_ on your recommendation.”

“Isn’t it something?” Very near rhapsodic.

That made Helena wince. “As long as I’m confessing: haven’t read it yet. But it _is_ on my bedside table.”

“Would _you_ lie to the woman _you’re_ going to marry?” Myka demanded, but her voice was lighter now, and Helena laughed with great relief. “Or do I need to go check?” Myka added.

“I suspect you’re better off staying here.”

“Am I?”

They fell silent, and Myka’s intention _could not_ have been to place so squarely in Helena’s mind an image of herself in Helena’s bedroom, touching her hand to the hard cover of the book. Touching her hand to the _Ladies of the Minoan Court_ fresco it depicted (Helena knew that was what it was, because she had got as far as the copyright page). Myka would stand right beside Helena’s bed, and she would look down and touch the representations of women’s bodies on the cover of that book… what would she then look up and say?

“I bet you’re fast,” Myka did then say.

“You—what?” That, Helena _could not_ have heard right.

“Reading.” The shift of her gaze toward Helena’s _could not_ have been sly. It _could not_. First and foremost, Myka was ill, and no matter how she rallied… but also, and nearly as foremost, they were engaged in a charade—literally _engaged_ in it—and that was all. Then: “And everything else, too,” the could-not-have-been-sly voice added.

Helena could think of no response. She now felt not fast at all, but instead intolerably slow, a beat behind. And she was not even the one who had been under sedation.

“What I mean,” Myka said, as if she were taking pity, “is that you don’t seem to overthink. For instance the neighborhood. It looks like you had an idea, and you had to hurry to make it real, or it would get away. An impulse. An impression?”

“Perhaps that’s _your_ impression, because _you_ had no time to overthink. You had only the briefest of glances at the model.”

“I saw the plans beforehand, remember? Plus I looked up your other projects. Do they come to you in dreams?”

Helena’s first thought was that that was a very strange question. Her second was that it was strangely right, and strangely revealing. “They _are_ dreams,” she said. “But with constraints. ‘Constrained dreams,’ that’s what I’ll call my monograph about design, someday.”

“Finance dictates fenestration,” Myka quoted.

“It certainly does,” Helena agreed. Fenestration, falsehoods, fiancées, foolishness…

“Here’s some financial dictating for you: the city will never come up with the money for that fountain. They won’t even try.”

“I suppose it could be left out without harming the integrity. It isn’t necessarily bad for a plan’s realization to be missing something—it leaves some room for the future. Perhaps even for the thing originally left out.”

“In theory I don’t disagree. But a fountain? The maintenance alone.”

“Children love them,” Helena protested.

“So do bacteria.”

“I can see why you’re anti-bacteria at the moment.”

“I wish I’d been anti-bacteri_al_. Although I guess that’s an argument in your fountain’s favor.”

Predicting what Myka would say, at any given moment, was quite difficult. As was accounting for what she did say. “I give,” Helena conceded. “How is that an argument in my fountain’s favor?”

“I could have thrown a coin in it and _made_ that wish.”

She sounded so disgruntled, as if she did not know what entity would be best to blame, either for the fountain’s not having been available to her or for her own failure to make the needed wish. “You’re quite silly,” Helena told her.

“Am I? It’s probably because I’m medicated. How am I quite silly?”

“You’ve failed to attend to the distinct possibility that your mother has been throwing coins of her own into fountains for far longer. Wishing for this romantic, destined outcome. How could your single coin and wish compete?”

That got Helena a small eyebrow-lift and head-shake. “My mom’s wishes,” Myka said. Her voice was soft again, fading a bit, but she rallied in the next moment to say, “Rick and I, we were really more like brother and sister,” in a tone that suggested this was one of the points she might have tried to convey to her mother. “Some people thought we were. You think it’s fate, right? That your family and someone else’s live on the same street. That you got handed this person you like and who likes you.”

“You are quite _pretty_ together,” Helena allowed. Two attractive animals…

“Aren’t we? Everybody always said words about how beautiful the children would be. Also part of my parents’ devastation, by the way. My mother’s been wishing for them, too, I bet—coin-clogged fountains everywhere she goes.”

Those wished-for children would indeed have been beautiful. But… “Do you want children?” Helena asked.

“I have no idea. Not with Rick, though. Poor beautiful little never-children.”

“A fairy story,” Helena proposed. “The beautiful never-children.”

Myka gave a little sniffle of skepticism. “Maybe more like one of those nightmares.”

“I can also say with certainty that I have never had an anxiety dream about fairy children.”

Myka yawned. “Never-children,” she said. Her last bit of wakefulness: the words wilted as she said them.

She fell asleep then, leaving Helena to contemplate beauty in combination, being thought fast, a wishing fountain for which the city would not pay, and children. Beautiful fairy never-children dancing fast around a never-fountain…

TBC

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> original part 3 tumblr tags: I don't know why I like to talk about lobsters so much, but I did have a stuffed one when I was a child, he was made of red velvet, anyway I assure you I would never eat them, as I am a very strict vegetarian, and none will be harmed in the furtherance of this awkwardly plotted lark, because I don't need any kind of vengeance-related invasion situation myself, as I have plenty on my anxiety plate as it is


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here’s what happens in this part: Myka and Helena talk to each other, and then they talk to each other again. At base, that’s it. They also look at nature, sort of, and ponder the past and causality. A couple of plot points tiptoe in… anyway the whole thing will most likely continue to strain credulity and be a talky mess! (I am staying in my lane.) A Bering and a Wells walk into a conference room: that’s how the joke starts, right? And then fate takes over.

Helena awoke in what was perhaps the most uncomfortable, yet inevitable, sleeping posture she had ever taken: still sitting in the chair beside Myka’s bed, but with her upper body slumped forward onto that bed. She felt a hand in her hair, petting, smoothing. “Are you awake?” Myka asked.

“Mmph,” Helena said.

“I promise I’m not trying to hurry you. But I think the hospital wants the bed.”

“I want the bed,” Helena mumbled. Movement seemed prohibitively effortful.

Myka’s hand continued its light stroke. “So do I,” she said.

Nice. So nice. A dissolve-into level of nice: exactly where she was, exactly what was happening.

Where she was, what was happening—Helena woke up, sat up. And then the process of Myka’s release from the hospital began. Helena summoned Steve, who, in his lovely way, facilitated everything: even driving Myka to her apartment, where he and Helena both did their best to ensure that she had everything she needed in the near term.

“I’m fine,” Myka assured them. “Really. You’ve done so much for me. Both of you, and I don’t know how to thank you.”

“Just be well,” Steve told her. Such simple, sweet words, and Myka said an equally unadorned “I’ll try” in response.

“Please do,” Helena added, a weak contribution, but it was all she could find.

As Helena and Steve were departing, Myka pulled on her arm. “You made it not a nightmare,” she said, and that too, was simple and sweet. Then she said, “If I’m ever hospitalized again, I want to be engaged to you for it.” She leaned to Helena and kissed her cheek, and receiving such a kiss was the same as delivering it: a surprise of softness and intimacy.

Helena, physically and emotionally flummoxed, said, “So do I.”

Steve asked, later, “Is there anything you need to tell me?”

“Of course not,” Helena said.

The following day, Helena received flowers at the office. A lovely, tasteful arrangement. “Thank you again,” the card said, “for everything.” It was signed, “Yours, Myka.”

She showed the card to Steve, who asked again, “Is there anything you need to tell me?”

This time, Helena answered, “Not that I’m aware of.”

“Interesting choice of words,” Steve said. “Awareness generally has to be cultivated.”

“You know I’m very bad at any such practice,” Helena said.

“You choose not to learn,” he countered.

“That’s your job,” she said. “Very nearly literally. If I were sufficiently mindful, why would I need you?”

“To schedule your appointments. By the way, you have a meeting with Myka next week.”

“I have a… what?”

“Yeah, she called me, to make sure you got the flowers, and to set up an appointment. Tuesday afternoon. And given how you just gasped, you might want to work on some mindful breathing skills between now and then.”

“Mind your own breathing,” she advised him, superfluously.

****

As Tuesday loomed, Helena fretted to Steve, “But how should I behave?”

He didn’t bother to shift his gaze from his computer screen. “Don’t knee her.”

“You’re a great help.”

****

By the time Tuesday at last arrived, however, “don’t knee her” had become Helena’s mantra, reminding her of everything that she should not do or say: don’t bring up anything specific about the hospital unless she does, don’t mention her illness unless she does, don’t presume any sort of intimacy between the two of you, don’t ask about the status of the bid… ultimately it came down to a general dictum against saying any words at all to her. Or, of course, touching her. Or being near enough to touch. “Don’t knee her” meant “be very still and quiet.”

On that fateful day, at the fateful time, Steve showed Myka into Helena’s office. He withdrew immediately, leaving Helena mildly surprised that he didn’t wink as he did so. Myka didn’t say anything, so Helena tried, “Hello.”

“Hi,” Myka said. She smiled.

And for a moment, Helena let herself enjoy that smile, accept it, return it… until such time as her not taking her turn to speak began to seem awkward. She hurried to say something, coming up with, “I thought we’d meet here instead of the conference room this time.”

So much for not kneeing her. Now Myka frowned, a subtle little face-twist that was the obverse of the smiles she’d performed in the hospital. “Scene of the crime,” she said.

“No, no. I just didn’t want you to be upset. It might have bad associations.”

“I’ll admit, they aren’t the best. Although it all started fine.” Now she smiled. “The hellos were really nice.”

“We’ll cling to those. How are you feeling now?”

“Much better. Not going to destroy your desk, I promise.” She fell silent again, and Helena was reassured, or something, by the idea that Myka, too, seemed to be searching for words at the right level of familiarity. “I was thinking,” Myka re-began, with clear determination, “I mean, what I thought, when I was thinking, was that I should tell you in person that I’m not overseeing the project anymore. You’ll be working mostly with Abigail from now on.”

“You were removed for becoming ill?” Helena asked, her dudgeon rising.

“No…” The little slack in Myka’s voice: she’d heard Helena’s indignation, which Helena knew was not her place to have or express or—“I was removed because I told my boss that you stayed with me at the hospital. I thought I was just recounting, factually, what happened that day, but she heard it as, this is going to look bad if anybody finds out about it. It’s going to look like you were trying to get in good with me.”

“The ethics of that,” Helena said, even as she thought, _The truth of that_.

“The new rules say nobody bidding on city projects can have a personal relationship with anybody who works for the city. Anybody who works for the city who can make decisions, that is. Or even _influence_ decisions.”

“The appearance of impropriety… I suppose I have to applaud the EMT who was caring for you in the ambulance for refusing me information because I had no such personal relationship with you. She did as she should. And so did Rick,” Helena said. “It’s all down to those personal relationships in the end, isn’t it? It wasn’t until he mentioned having been engaged to you that I made my, shall we say, ill-considered decision. To say what I said. To claim what I claimed.”

“I’m sorry for that. My failed relationship, making your life difficult.”

“I’m fairly certain your life has been made more difficult by that than mine has… although failed relationships don’t tend to make anyone’s life easier.” _Reveal something_, she felt again, as in the hospital. She surprised herself by saying, “I was engaged once myself.” She didn’t tend to disclose that. Didn’t tend to think about it, but lately…

“What happened?” Myka asked, then shook her head. “Sorry. Forget I asked.”

“Aren’t you the one who said ‘too personal’ is off the table? She left me. I don’t blame her; I was—am—far too focused on my work. I had thought being married, or rather, promising to one day be married, would fix things. Or at least push problems into the future, so I could concentrate on what seemed more important in the present. It worked for a while.”

“But then she left you.”

“But then she did. As I say, I don’t blame her.”

Myka took her time in responding to that, which in turn gave Helena time to consider that surprisingly brief conversation for which she did not blame Giselle. “This isn’t working,” Giselle had said, to which Helena had agreed, “No. Not at the present moment.” And she would have explained that that was why she had made promises about the future, but Giselle had continued on, not angry but factual, “This isn’t working because you won’t work at this. You’ll work at your work, all the time, because you can see that it’s _worth_ work, but you won’t work at this.”

And Helena had agreed again: “That is entirely true.” And its truth meant that the promised future would never—should never—come.

She had counted the hours, for it was hours and not days, until every physical trace of Giselle was gone from her life. And after those hours, all at once, the present, no longer mortgaged to that promised future, was clean, keen.

When at last Myka spoke, she asked, “Do you miss her?”

Helena wavered. Should she tell the truth? “Before last week, I would have said no.” That was true. “Then I spent a day in hospital.” All right, that was true too.

“When most people say something like that, they mean they were the sick one.”

“Well. Egotistically, I like to think I’m not most people.”

“That’s…” Myka paused, as if searching her mental thesaurus. She shook her head. “That’s _true_.” That made Helena laugh, which in turn made Myka smile as she said, “I’m sorry, though. For all of it, but even more, if it made you miss her.”

_Continue being honest._ “It isn’t her as herself so much, I think, as there being something else, or someone else, to pay attention to.”

“But you didn’t. Pay that attention, I mean. To her?”

“I didn’t. But I… I remember that I liked knowing someone was there, even as I didn’t do what I should have, with regard to her.” She stopped. “I hadn’t said it out loud before, not that way. It’s awful.”

“Then I guess you should double not blame her for leaving. But aren’t we all awful like that?” Myka made a face, a grimace-and-eyeroll concoction. “Maybe we’re not. It’s probably wrong to generalize from just you and me.”

“You?” Helena asked. Myka didn’t at all seem the type to be as neglectful as Helena had. As thoughtless. As… offhand.

“With my parents, if no one else. I know they’re there, even if I don’t make the effort I should. Even if I push problems into the future.”

“Given your mother’s apparently desperate wish to see you married off to Rick, I can certainly understand your attitude.”

“She just wants me to be happy,” Myka said.

_I can understand that too_, Helena thought.

Myka chose that moment to notice that upon the upper right edge of Helena’s desk sat a piece of the neighborhood model, the one piece Steve had managed to salvage in his cleanup. One small building and its landscaping: a curving, balsa-clad little structure with a courtyard featuring two wire trees. It was intended to represent a community center.

_Don’t knee her_. Helena had meant to hide it away.

Myka picked the building up, turned it in her hands. The swoop of its roof-line rhymed with the curl of each of her fingers. “Time,” she said. “How much of it do we get? I mean you do start to understand why people do things. And maybe there’s forgiveness, or maybe it’s just recognition that it isn’t then anymore. Have you seen her since it ended?”

“No. Like you with Rick, she wanted a clean break. So did I. In fact I quit the job I had, and I started this firm—my attitude was something on the order of ‘Oh, you thought _that_ was work? I’ll show you _work_.’”

“Interesting response,” Myka said, still focused on inspecting the tiny community center.

“Ill-considered.”

Myka readjusted the wire branches of the trees, such that they now seemed to be fighting against—or accepting and bending to—a current of air. “You say that a lot.”

“I _do_ that a lot,” Helena said. That, too, was true.

Now Myka looked up. “You didn’t cheat on her, did you?”

A reasonable question, given that Helena had revealed herself to be so callous; Myka could not be blamed for imagining Helena capable of that, too. “Only with my work,” Helena told her.

“Better than with another woman.”

“I’m not sure that’s true. The result was the same.”

The little frown again, just a twitch, but visible. “Not for her. Trust me on this one.”

“He _cheated on you_?” Now Helena was regretting not _seeking out_ surgical implements when she had the chance.

“You don’t have to defend my honor…” Myka said, and there again was the slack, the indulgence. “You’re not engaged to me anymore.”

“Who in their right mind,” Helena fumed, knowing it was inappropriate to fume, yet fuming all the same. _How dare he_.

“In his defense—not that I really want to defend him, but your face sort of makes me feel like I should—I did spend an awful lot of time at work. Still do. Like you… I mean, so did he, so I guess in that sense we were already cheating on each other. With it. In your sense. He just found somebody he wanted to sleep with, there. Meanwhile I just wanted to sleep.” Myka sighed. “It would have turned out the same way, regardless.”

“Philosophical of you,” Helena said.

“Time. Would yours have turned out differently?”

“No. Not then.”

“Would it turn out differently now?”

“I haven’t changed.” Perhaps her truest statement thus far.

“Maybe you aren’t supposed to.” Myka set the model piece back on Helena’s desk, in the spot it had previously occupied. Then she rotated it so that the “trees” faced Helena. She looked up at Helena as she did so. “I read somewhere that it’s healthy to look at nature. Anyway, I just wanted to let you know… the situation. And to say thank you in person. Also I really need to buy you new clothes and pay for the rest of this poor model. And whatever it cost to have your conference room cleaned. That had to be terrible.”

“I have no idea. I was at the hospital with my fiancée.”

“Seriously, send me a bill.”

“Absolutely not.”

“I wish you would. I do owe you.”

“I’d say it was my pleasure, but that would be slightly untrue,” Helena said. “But only slightly.”

She received a new small smile in response. Helena knew it was new, that it was a variation she had not previously seen, and knowing someone’s smiles would, under other circumstances, mean something. Under these circumstances, however? False intimacy. That was all it was, had been, would be. A strangely affecting day of false intimacy.

“I liked being engaged to you,” Helena ventured to the empty air, after Myka had gone.

****

Over the next weeks, Abigail, clearly an instigator of the first rank, would remark to Helena something on the order of, “You want to ask me about her.”

“The appearance of a conflict of interest,” Helena would respond.

Or Abigail would prod, “I could say hi to her for you, if you want.”

“And we could all lose our jobs as a result,” Helena would “remind” her.

Helena did not put a stop to these exchanges, mainly because they seemed to delight Abigail so thoroughly. Self-preservation: she needed to win the contract as much as she ever had, and there were now two strikes against her. Thus if Abigail enjoyed these good-natured tormentings of Helena, Helena would suffer them.

What she would also do—because Helena didn’t doubt that Abigail was digging at Myka in some similar way, perhaps even by reporting back to her exactly what Helena said—was ignore her own stupidly avid imaginings of the expressions that might cross Myka’s face whenever Abigail delivered any such dig, or any such report.

****

“You won,” Abigail informed Helena, directly after the closed-door city council meeting during which the decision was made. “You’ll get the official letter soon, but I figured you’d want to know ASAP. So get going, project manager. Oh, also, you were exactly right, in that final presentation, to talk about the fountain being optional. They nixed it first thing—but they were raving about your ‘flexibility.’”

Had it not been for the never-children, Helena most likely would not have remembered Myka’s words about the fountain for which the city would not pay… words that led her to adopt her position of supposed “flexibility.” Funny, then, or something: that Myka had influenced the decision after all. In reverse, and not knowing she had done so, but still.

Helena told Steve the good news, told the rest of the staff. Awarded bonuses. Steve’s was smaller than those of the others, but Helena said, in response to his quickly hidden disappointment, “I thought you’d appreciate a permanent rise in salary a bit more.”

“A raise,” he said, and he looked far too grateful about receiving something he had long deserved, so she made him laugh by correcting him: “Rise.” He asked if it would be paid in pounds rather than dollars, she said no, and he claimed the right to call it a raise.

Elation all around, well-earned excitement, a bit of trepidation at the size of the project. All as expected.

All as expected, but for the sharp thorn of regret that Helena could not dislodge from her own reaction to that good news.

It was not that she had been hoping for an alternative outcome. It was not even that she knew with certainty what she would have done, had that alternative outcome come to pass, other than rush to cobble together enough small projects to compensate and continue to make payroll. Whatever else she would have done would now never be known, and would never be done. And that, she was willing to admit to herself—but only as she sat in her office alone, staring at the model-piece—was the root of her regret.

****

On a morning two weeks after the awarding of the contract, Helena answered her telephone with an absent, “Helena Wells.”

“Hi,” she heard, and her immediate recognition of that voice ensured that Helena was no longer absent. “I just wanted to report,” Myka went on, “as someone with whom you have no personal relationship whatsoever would do, that I’m cancer-free.”

Helena was caught so wrong-footed that she managed only a general sound of enthusiasm, an exclamatory “Ah.”

It seemed to do, however, for Myka said, “Also… one other thing.”

Now Helena offered an interrogatory “Ah?”

“I need your help. Completely separate and apart from anything having to do with the bid and the city. You know how I said we’re not engaged anymore?”

Helena wrenched herself back onto an actual linguistic track. “Yes,” she said, with firm purpose.

“What if that weren’t true, just for one little evening?”

“What if it weren’t true that we are not engaged.”

“Right.”

“Which would mean that we _are_ engaged,” Helena said, just to make sure they were talking about the same thing.

“Right.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“It’s my mother. She’s going to be in town, and now that she knows Rick’s here, she wants to get together with him. And I don’t want to have to explain to him why you aren’t there too.”

“But doesn’t that mean you’ll have to tell your mother this… untruth?”

“That’s why it’s perfect. It gets her off my back times two: about Rick and about finding someone, period.”

“I suspect she’ll eventually become suspicious when we continue to postpone the wedding,” Helena said.

“I will cross that bridge when it stops buying me short-term peace.”

“If all you want is peace, why haven’t you simply told her an untruth already?”

“You don’t know my mother. She won’t believe things unless she sees them, and she won’t see them unless she believes them—but clearly, you and I are a believable couple, given that Rick bought it.”

He hadn’t, of course, so Helena had no real reason to imagine that Myka’s mother would be taken in. Helena tried, “Rick aside, I’m sure Abigail or anyone else you know would be delighted to pretend to have asked for your hand.” She suspected, in fact, that Abigail would throw herself into such a performance. For the entertainment value alone.

“Okay, I get it. You don’t want to do this, which is completely understandable. You’ve already done so much for me, and this is too much. I get it.”

Helena regarded the wire trees whose branches Myka had so carefully disarranged. She hadn’t touched them, hadn’t altered their windblown aspect since that disarrangement. She also had not reoriented the model-piece. Helena, too, had read that it was healthy to look at nature. “I didn’t say it was too much. But… are you always this duplicitous?”

A pause. Helena imagined the blink of lids over those green eyes. Then Myka said, “In my life, I have never been this duplicitous.”

“Then I’m not certain I should support your behaving in a way that is apparently wildly out of character.”

“I didn’t want to have to bring this up,” Myka said, her tone severe, “but: you started it. You’re the one who told Rick we were engaged.”

“No, _you_ started it. You’re the one who had an unfortunate incident in my conference room and ended up in hospital.”

“Technically, then, I think H. pylori started it.”

“You’re blaming the bacterium,” Helena said, incredulous—and yet not at all incredulous.

“Well, I mean. Causes.”

And Helena thought: _She may be the strangest person I have ever met. She is certainly one of the loveliest, both physically and—who can say?—very possibly in every other way as well. And regardless of whether those things have any bearing on the situation, you, Helena Wells, are the one who told Rick not to tell her that he knew. And he has apparently held to that, so you owe him some reciprocal courtesy, in terms of not causing Myka any additional embarrassment or trouble. And if telling this story to her mother would lighten any of the weight she bears…_

“All right,” Helena said. “When and where?”

“When” was in three days’ time; “where,” Myka’s apartment. “My mom’s a picky eater,” she explained. “It’s easier to cook than to get restaurants to accommodate her.”

“And no one is likely to see us together.”

“There’s that,” Myka agreed.

TBC

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> original part 4 tumblr tags: it should be clear by now that I'm obsessed with causes, both proximate and ultimate, also dealmaking, the whys and wherefores, and with that the author got on a plane, to go to a place and do a thing, a thing that has to do with causes and consequences, anyway, one of my favorite movie lines is Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks saying to each other, in Joe Versus the Volcano, "We'll jump and we'll see", so that's what we'll do


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I swear up and down, on any and all books, holy or no, that the bulk of this part, and in particular its opening scene, was written well before its original posting. Five people know why I need to offer this disclaimer. Well, six, I guess… anyway, I really think the lesson is that you should always buy the flowers. People like flowers. Then again, they do also like books, so, you know, giver’s choice. In other news, there is a lot of chaff here in this part, but I’m a little tired and haven’t had the time or attentive energy to do the brutal, sveltifying edit I’d prefer.

Given that the point of the exercise was to put on a show for Myka’s mother, Helena thought that she would be well served by performing “fiancée” more competently than she had done in the past. That required a consideration of what the mother of her intended might want to see… a gesture, no doubt, but not just any gesture. Something effortful seemed called for.

In Helena’s experience, mothers liked flowers. Her own mother certainly did. But flowers alone were insufficiently effortful; they could be ordered online, and that would not do. Instead, Helena went to a florist and contributed (mainly nods of assent, but even so) to the assembly of a bouquet. Then, spurred by a desire to _out_do—someone, or something, although who or what that might have been, she did not know—she chose the components of a second.

On the appointed day, at the appointed time, her hands overflowing with flowers, she waited at Myka’s door.

Too much. Of course so many flowers were too much, and that fact became ever more clear to her as she waited, and she began to wonder why Myka found it necessary to live in a building featuring a hallway that failed to present any good and hidden space where the overeager faux-affianced might be able to dispose of a spray of peonies, hydrangeas, and daisies—or, on (in) the other hand, a more romantic collection of roses, tulips, and lilies.

But then Myka opened the door, and the sight of her was a pulse-quickening delight, such that Helena forgot about flowers entirely and had to remind herself of her purpose here: not to gaze with appreciation, but rather to deploy some fiction of that gaze… but she did feel that she could take some pleasure in the fact that Myka looked so well. “You look so well,” Helena allowed herself to say.

“I feel well. Your hands are full.”

“They are.”

A throat-clear from behind Myka reminded Helena, and seemed to remind Myka as well, why they were in a circumstance that allowed them to stand and look at each other. “This is my mom, Jeannie Bering,” Myka said as she stepped aside to let Helena in.

“Mrs. Bering. It’s lovely to meet you. I mean, to meet you at last,” Helena said. Myka’s mother looked to be in her early sixties, and she dressed to complement, not fight against, her graying hair. Not too youthful, yet not surrendering… she was by no means nondescript, but neither was she her striking, bone-china-fine daughter. _Genes and their actions are mystifying but if this is the result then hallelujah_, Helena found herself thinking, and she very nearly said aloud, “Thank you so much for this mystery you produced.” Instead, she unburdened herself of the peony-hydrangea-daisy bouquet and said, “These are for you.” She was pleased to see Myka’s mother smile.

“And these?” Myka asked, with a nod at the second. Did she sound hopeful?

“You can’t possibly need to ask.” Helena leaned over and kissed Myka’s cheek, as she had done before the endoscopy; as Myka had kissed her, after the hospital. So chastely intimate, this kissing they did.

The rose-tulip-lily handoff was slightly awkward: a which-hand-to-which-hand problem. Then the aftermath became slightly awkward: a should-we-be-speaking-to-each-other-instead-of-staring-at-each-other problem.

Myka’s mother saved them. “Thank you, Helena. These are lovely,” she said, and then she gestured with her bouquet at her daughter. “Enjoy this while it lasts, Myka. Your father hasn’t brought me flowers since our first anniversary.”

Helena considered that showing up the father of her fiancée might have constituted a small misstep in her performance.

Myka gestured back at her mother with her own flowers and said, “This is the kind of thing she does.” To Helena, she said, “It’s the kind of thing you do. Isn’t it.”

“With you it is,” Helena said.

“I hope it’s only with me.”

That had to have been for her mother’s benefit, so Helena tried to answer in kind. “As far as I know. As far as I can imagine.” She tried to ignore the fact that what she was saying was true. How most of the words that she said to Myka were true. She went on, “She’s sent me flowers as well, Mrs. Bering. I take my cue from her good example.”

“Call me Jeannie,” said Myka’s mother to Helena, and to Myka, “this one certainly is a sweet talker.” Helena couldn’t determine whether that was meant to be criticism or praise.

“By the way,” Myka said to Helena, “I got you a book.” She handed Helena a paperback. Face-down.

“Myka,” said her mother, and this was unmistakably criticism, “just because you grew up in a bookstore, that’s no reason to fall back on giving a book as a gift. Particularly to someone who brings you flowers.”

Helena turned the book over. Apprehended the title and cover art. Said to Myka a long-suffering “Really?” in an only partly feigned tone of beleaguered affection. Said then, to Jeannie, “She hasn’t given me_ **a**_ book. She’s given me David Foster Wallace’s _Consider the Lobster_.” She wanted to ask, of Myka, “You grew up in a bookstore?” But a fiancée would have known that already. _We should have rehearsed_, she thought, and then, given where her thoughts immediately went, _Not like **that**_.

Myka, as if reading Helena’s mind, said, “You can put it with _The Odyssey_ on your nightstand,” in a voice so smooth and smoke-low that Helena herself nearly believed they had held exactly _that_ rehearsal after all. Possibly having read passages from _The Odyssey_ to set the mood.

Jeannie told Myka, “You don’t need to speak in code. I think I understand that you’re familiar with Helena’s bedroom.”

“Mom,” said Myka, sounding a note that combined conciliation with teenage mortification.

Helena, thinking both to calm herself and to ease Myka’s discomfiture, held the book’s cover up to show Jeannie what it depicted. “It is indisputable that this creature is large and has claws, is it not?”

Perhaps genes were not so puzzling after all: Jeannie’s poker-faced blink was exactly like her daughter’s.

“Then I assure you,” Helena went on, “if a bedroom is the context, this constitutes an attempt by your daughter to invade my nightmares.”

“Helena,” Myka said.

And just like that, Helena realized that she had never before heard Myka say her name. “Myka,” she said in response, trying it out _as_ a response.

A knock on the door interrupted their renewed should-we-be-speaking-to-each-other-instead-of-staring-at-each-other awkwardness.

Rick, of course. “You lovely boy!” Jeannie exclaimed upon seeing him, and Helena felt that her flowers had been erased. But Jeannie then said, “You’re almost as lovely as these flowers!”

And Helena preened: _Rick_ had not brought anyone flowers. He was, however, able to say, with an easy familiarity, “Hey, Mrs. B. Long time. How’s Mr. B?”, and Helena was acutely aware that she could never have done that. Would never be able to do that.

But she was gratified by the fact that Myka held her place by her side, allowing Rick and Jeannie to renew their acquaintance. She murmured to Myka, “I can now say with certainty that your mother and I have never met before.”

Myka murmured back, “She sighed and said the words about destiny, but that was before I broke the news about you. About us. Then she asked me if you really existed. _Then_ she asked me if I’d told Rick that you existed, and she’s coal-in-her-stocking disappointed about not getting to see any fireworks surrounding _that_ reveal.”

Helena couldn’t contain a bark of laughter. “Isn’t one supposed to dislike one’s in-laws? You’re making it very difficult for me to dislike your mother.”

“You should be thankful that I talked her out of the idea of all of us—her, me, you, and Rick—telling my father about you tonight in some kind of teleconference situation. He’s on a fishing trip, by the way, and I think she was counting on all kinds of bad-connection monkeyshines, plus Dad hates technology anyway, everything that came after movable type. I’m always better off writing him a letter when anything’s going on.”

“Perhaps you could write him a book to sell in the store you grew up in,” Helena said.

“Sorry for not mentioning.”

“We should have run full background checks on each other. Then again, the likelihood of awkward revelations…” That won Helena a smirk. “Even in the absence of the revelations and the awkwardness, I do see, quite clearly, why you needed me to be here.”

“I appreciate it,” Myka told her. “The fact that you see it, and the fact that you’re here. I appreciate it so much, in fact, that I also didn’t cook lobster. Intentionally.”

“Would you have? Otherwise?”

“Probably not.”

“You are solicitous in a way I don’t fully understand.”

An unusual expression, one that Helena could not read other than as “not negative,” visited Myka’s face. “Don’t freak out, but I’m going to hug you now,” she said, and she did just that: hugged Helena.

For all their strange intimacy, they had never been body-to-body before. It was only a quick clasp, and Helena had of course hugged several people in the past, and vice versa, for example most recently when celebrating the awarding of the contract, weeks before. Quick clasps. None of those had set her on fire; ergo, this one was not doing so either.

She heard, from somewhere outside her not-at-all inflamed body, Jeannie announcing to Rick, “You saved Myka’s life!” As if this would be news to him.

To his credit, Rick said, “Not exactly. But I definitely owed her, so I’m glad I could help.”

“It must have been so frightening for everyone. And of course Myka’s father and I would have been concerned as well _if we’d been told in a timely fashion_.”

Myka said, placating, “I told you I’m sorry, and I’ll keep telling you, but like I also told you, it happened so fast. Helena _and_ Rick can vouch for that. And then it was pretty much over.”

Helena tried to help but managed only, “It _was_ fast.” Then she gritted out, “But Rick knew exactly what he was doing. I can’t imagine she could have had better care.”

“That’s nice of you to say,” Rick said, sounding wary.

“It is nice,” Myka affirmed. She sounded not at all wary. “And it was nice having _both of you_ there. I felt very protected.”

He had indeed taken good care of Myka. And if Myka could be philosophical, here in the present situation, about the past she shared with him, Helena had no reason to take any position at all regarding the present situation. She had no reason to take any position at all, regardless of Myka’s feelings about the past. No reason. No reason.

Myka and her mother repaired to the kitchen, ostensibly to finish preparing the food, but perhaps also so Jeannie could offer an initial comparative verdict regarding Myka’s choices, past and present, of romantic partners. At that point, Rick rounded on Helena. “What do you think you’re doing?” he demanded.

“Something that Myka asked me to do. So keep your voice down, please.”

He pressed his lips together, narrowed his eyes. Then he let the tension go. He leaned closer to her and whispered, “Why didn’t you just tell her I know the truth?”

“Thank you,” Helena acknowledged. “Why? For the same reason I said you should not tell it to her: I thought it would hurt her.”

“Are you still trying to lift that Volkswagen? Or are you actually dating now? What’s going on?”

“I don’t believe that’s your business.”

“When it comes to Myka, it is.”

“No… I don’t believe so.” He looked as if he would protest, so Helena said, “What I mean is that despite your history, whatever she is doing now is not your business. And not my business, either. Please, let her make the choices. You shouldn’t, and I shouldn’t. Besides, this has more to do with her mother than with you or with me.”

Rick didn’t answer. Helena couldn’t determine whether his breathing indicated that they had called a truce. Finally, he said, “I don’t get you.” Not dismissive; he said it as a statement of fact.

“Likewise,” Helena told him. “Fortunately, it doesn’t matter. Can we get through this meal, and let that be an end?”

“This meal….” Rick shook his head, then raised his hands in surrender. “Just for Myka, though. Not because you and I are suddenly friends or anything.”

“Agreed: for Myka, and you and I are by no means suddenly friends. Or anything. By the way, do you like lobster?” Helena asked.

“What? Yeah, I like lobster.”

“Well, that won’t help.”

****

While they ate their non-lobster dinner, Helena found herself faced with the history—and physical reality—of Myka and Rick together. He’d kissed her cheek not long after he arrived, stranding Helena in a “how dare you” loop, despite her knowing full well that he had far more right than she herself did. They kept turning into a couple, Myka and Rick did—a club, as they had in those very first hospital moments, their association off-limits to Helena. Just like the hospital, only now, Myka’s mother was part of the club; they all reminisced about Colorado, about people and circumstances and even _objects_ to which Helena had no access: “The ping-pong table!” “Is the comic book store on Monroe still there?” “Can you believe Denny Cloud lives in Argentina now? And has six kids?” All Helena had to reminisce with Myka about was “the time you found out you had _cancer_.”

But after (Helena had to admit) not _too_ very much of that, Myka reached over and took Helena’s hand. “That’s enough about the past,” she said.

Rick looked at their hands. As he had in those later hospital moments. Then he said, “Am I really supposed to act like I don’t know things I know?” He gazed right at Helena, not quite challenging her, as he spoke.

“I don’t think that’s what I said,” Myka told him.

“That is not what _you_ said,” Helena noted. She gazed at Rick in return. “But occasionally it might be important to act like one does not know the things one knows. To keep the peace?” She moved her eyes meaningfully, but as subtly as she could, in Myka’s direction.

He compressed his lips at her. But: “To keep the peace,” he allowed.

Helena found it rather funhouse-mirror that she was conspiring with two different people this evening, to accomplish two different—even diametrically opposed—aims. Did that make her a double agent? Did it make Rick one as well?

Myka’s mother chose that moment to say, to Helena and to Rick, “You two are so similar.”

“What?” they said, in unison, leaving Helena, and judging by his expression, Rick also, unpleased to have illustrated her point.

Jeannie smiled. “Let’s start with this truce you’ve clearly struck,” she said. “I see that it’s for Myka’s benefit—and for mine—and I see also that you’re doing reasonably well, the both of you. Then again I get a sense you might both prefer the more direct approach of throwing punches, and I just wanted to make sure you know I wouldn’t stop you. Myka might, but she’s always been more sentimental than I am.”

Rick shook his head and touched his fingers to his upper lip, pressing against his hidden teeth. Then he smiled. “You haven’t changed one bit, Mrs. B.”

“Mom,” Myka said. “First, you’re the most sentimental person in this room. And second, if they want to punch each other, they’re adults.” She shot a little glance at Helena and said, “They can make their own ill-considered choices.” With another glance, she added, “Besides, they’re plenty different. One particularly salient way.”

_Here it comes_, Helena thought. She had tried not to dwell on how, in her initial clumsy haste to claim this relationship with Myka, she had not considered that Myka might not respond well to the idea of being engaged to a woman. And despite Myka’s having found it conceptually acceptable, Helena hadn’t been able to determine where Myka’s orientation did reside. The fact of the matter was that whenever their bodies touched, Helena involuntarily drew a conclusion that seemed, in the moment, to be true. But Helena had mistaken the accidental bodily spark of curiosity for truth before, and mistakes of that sort did not end well.

She could never have asked, not about any of it, because if she had asked, Myka would have been likely to suspect that Helena had some investment in knowing. And since this was all fiction, what could justify such an investment? Nothing, nothing, nothing, and now less than nothing, now that even the fiction was so unwise to maintain. Beyond this evening, certainly, so unwise.

Myka’s one salient difference was, in the end, completely unhelpful in every respect: “Rick doesn’t do urban design; Helena isn’t a doctor,” she said. Helena wanted, unreasonably, to shake her for being unforthcoming, and then again for stating the obvious.

Jeannie did not shake Myka, but she did say, in the most dry of tones, “Thank you for stating the obvious. You might as well have gone with ‘he’s a man; she’s a woman.’” Jeannie really was making it quite difficult for Helena to dislike her. She went on, “Besides, young lady, that former difference might not be so salient. Don’t we talk about building bodies? Don’t we say that cities have hearts?”

Helena was the one to blink this time. “That seems rather right. The heart of a city might be a neighborhood, a cluster—”

“But hearts have _valves_,” Rick said. It read a bit self-satisfied, as if he’d caught her out, but also a bit teenage, catching out Jeannie, the adult.

Myka groaned. She dropped Helena’s hand so she could clap her hands over her ears. “Don’t mention valves. So. Many. Valve. Replacements. I might as well be in _valve_ planning. The water system. Sewage. The waste-to-energy plant. HVAC in every building. Strip nozzles on the de-icing trucks. _Everywhere_. If anything urban goes bust, you can bet there are going to be expensive valves involved. Valves should be a line item in the budget. And no health insurance to defray the cost, either.”

“But isn’t that taxes?” Helena objected.

“Ssh. I’m disputing the metaphor.”

“No, just the source of the monies. You’re saying that everything is valves, which is true, in the sense that it is, of an anatomical heart, but that the _monies_—”

“Ssh.” And Myka’s finger was suddenly against Helena’s lips, and that was provocation of a very physical sort. Practically body-to-body in its effect.

Helena had never before wanted to be both exactly where she was and somewhere else entirely, with the same person doing the same thing. Disorienting.

“Here are two things I dare you to dispute,” Jeannie said. “First, that we’re relieved the cancer was so easily treatable, and second, we’re almost as relieved that it wasn’t any hereditary kind.”

Rick said, “First one okay. But the second…. I’m not saying I’m disputing it, but I don’t get _why_ the hereditary thing has us relieved.”

Helena caught herself nodding along with him. She stopped nodding immediately.

Jeannie said, “Because then it isn’t my fault that she got it, so she can’t blame me. That’s certainly a relief. Plus, I’m unlikely to get it. Given that I didn’t have it to pass on.”

“You could swallow the same bacteria I did,” Myka told her.

“You don’t have to swallow it,” Rick said. “We’re not entirely sure how the infection—”

“Why won’t anybody let me make a point?” Myka interrupted. Helena noticed that she did not put a finger against _Rick’s_ lips. “Anyway, maybe whatever I did to get it, _that’s_ what’s genetic, the tendency to do that, and it can strike whenever. So you should watch out, Mom.”

“For stray bacteria,” Jeannie said. Very dry, yet again.

Myka said, “You never know what’s going to hit you.”

“I can attest,” Helena said, recalling the ambulance.

“Also a lot of people get infected in childhood,” Rick said. “H. pylori can bide its time for decades.”

“Setting aside the insult to my parenting that I hear hiding somewhere in there, you’re saying Myka was a ticking time bomb? In whatever sense you’d like to take that, by the way.”

Rick tilted his head and said “that seems right” at the same moment Helena raised an eyebrow and offered “I suspect so.” They looked at each other; Rick’s lips thinned, and Helena sat back and crossed her arms with a sigh. Jeannie said nothing, but her smile was easily legible as smug.

“We have very different feelings about lobsters,” Helena informed her.

Jeannie’s smug smile turned sly. “But what about nightstands?”

Myka, who had turned her attention to the contents of her wineglass, began to cough. “Mom, seriously,” she said. “I’d really appreciate it if you didn’t scare her off.”

“Speaking of scaring her off,” Rick said, “or maybe the opposite, who knows, but you know what I’ve been wondering? How you two decided to make it official. Because it seemed really—I don’t know—sudden. From my perspective. So Helena, why don’t you tell me?”

_You are doing this because Myka asked for your help_, Helena told herself,_ thus punching him in the face is not an option_. Then again, Jeannie had indicated that she would find exactly that sort of fireworks entertaining… yet he was sticking to the letter of their agreement, such as it was. Further, punching was in a physical family with kneeing, and Helena was trying not to do that anymore. She bared her teeth at him and began, “We met through work. _As you know_. And something unexpected happened. We became… close. Unexpectedly close. Unexpectedly quickly. And we thought it wise to declare our intentions to each other. Before work exhausted us both to such an extent that we forgot what those intentions were, that is.”

Myka said, “We were so wise. Look at all this wisdom.”

Her gaze at Helena might reasonably have been described as “adoring,” and under that gaze, Helena said, “It happened so quickly that I barely believed it was real.” If only that adoring gaze _could_ have been real… “Even now,” Helena said, with honesty, “I can’t quite believe it.”

Jeannie remarked, “That’s very like what Myka said.”

“Is it?” Helena said. “I suppose we were both surprised. One doesn’t expect, on any given day, to find someone to… talk to. And to look at. With appreciation for both. And to realize you want to—come home to that.” One didn’t expect such things. And one needed to be very careful about imagining that one’s nonexistent expectations had so unexpectedly been met.

“That’s lovely,” Jeannie now said, and her tone was not dry at all.

Myka nodded. “It _is_,” she said. “And I completely agree with all of it.” The adoration directed Helena’s way had intensified, and if only that could have been something other than an act—or rather, if only they could have had the space to find out whether it could become something other than an act. Rather, whether, other. Nothing was likely to bring about such a not-this state of affairs.

Rick clearly did not share such a wish, for he gave an exaggerated sigh and said, “Please stop.”

“You’re the one who asked how it happened,” Myka said with a shrug. “Don’t blame me if what you get makes you jealous.”

“This is not what you used to be like,” Rick told her. To Helena, he said, “This is not what she used to be like,” and finally, to Jeannie, he directed a plaintive, “Is it?”

“Don’t worry,” Jeannie said. She pat his cheek, and how familiar a motion it was; how accustomed. “You’ll find a young lady of your own. Look at you!”

_I would rather not look at him_, Helena thought. _I would in fact rather look at Myka. For quite some time. And talk to her as well. But that would be a not-this state of affairs, and that cannot happen._

Rick left soon after their non-lobster dinner concluded, and Helena, although tempted to overstay, made to follow him out. But she found herself in unavoidable proximity to Myka in the apartment’s small foyer, and it did seem that, as Myka’s putative romantic partner, she should do something… romantic. Given, in particular, that Myka’s mother was watching. (Discreetly, not staring, and Helena appreciated that.) She thought to fall back on their customary cheek-kiss, but even as she moved close, she saw—felt—that it was insufficient. There would have to be more. “Is this all right?” she exhaled, close to Myka’s ear.

Myka sighed out a breath of _yes_, and then she turned her head and the kiss was inevitable.

Helena meant it to be quick, light, a performance of “we have kissed before and will kiss again and so this particular kiss is of no great importance.”

But they had not kissed before, and Helena thought, _There is a reason I am not an actor_, for the quick, light performance of whatever kiss this was supposed to be became instead the kiss it _was_: first. So long-awaited, so _finally_, so soft, so warm, so _her mouth_ and _my mouth_; it could have gone on and on… and on and on… but she was here to _help_, not to make everything worse. She pulled away. Not far enough, though, for she and Myka were caught, staring, breathing.

Kissing her again would be, Helena saw with great clarity, a bad idea. But such a _good_ bad idea, and what could one more kiss matter when one had already been too much?

What could it matter that when Helena moved forward again, Myka did too? What could it matter that Myka’s hands pushed their way up Helena’s arms, that those hands romanced their way into Helena’s hair? What could it matter than while Helena had thought the first kiss stirring, now each pulse of her blood was warmer than the last, each beat raising the temperature of her heart, her body entire? Something original animated this kiss, something Helena had never experienced before—not the revelatory surprise of a teenage kiss, when intimacy itself could feel new, but instead, a connection offering a far more mature, beckoning sense of deep possibility…

…but then it was not original at all, and certainly not unique to the two of them: expressive of a wish to move in ways familiarly of the body, ways not fit for a well-appointed apartment foyer under bright shine of a tasteful light fixture…

They broke apart.

Helena felt hot lungfuls of air enter and leave her body through her mouth. She stared, and Myka stared back.

_Mindfulness_. Helena closed her mouth and began to breathe through her nose, calming herself, for this had to be the end of it. The strange events had now been brought to their conclusion, logical or otherwise. On this kiss, or on these two kisses, the curtain could fall; their little play had come to its correct end.

“I’ll see you,” Myka said.

“Will you?” Helena asked without thinking. But no matter what Myka said, the real answer would be no.

****

Helena talked herself home, expressing aloud several versions of the reasoned judgment that she was happy—no, _relieved_—to have got out with only this: this physical knowledge that she and Myka were two wanting bodies that could collide with purpose. That wasn’t too heavy a burden to bear. Rather, it was something to know. People knew all sorts of things, about themselves, about other people, about themselves in relation to other people… about their feelings for other people, about other people’s possible feelings for them, about how those feelings might be expressed in situations involving privacy and…

“Stop,” she admonished herself, still aloud. “You… want her; she has kissed you—once—as if she might.” An inhale, again a ragged lungful. “Want you. That is the situation as it stands tonight, as it will stand tomorrow, and so on until it does not stand that way anymore. No actions will be taken as a result of that situation, because they cannot be taken, so _stop_.”

She did, at least, stop talking to herself.

At home, Helena did what she always did, whether she needed distraction or not: she worked. Email inbox first, then two employee performance reviews she had been neglecting, then the composition of a rudimentary workflow document for a new office-park project, and then at last the comparative luxury of losing herself, by way of an initial run at that new project, in the soothing complexities of AutoCAD. Constraints and how to work within them… when she had been learning the program as a student, years and years ago, she had spent so much intense time with it that her dreams reflected its black-backgrounded renderings.

Considering dreams made her consider lobsters. But she should not consider lobsters.

Instead, she considered dimensions, materials. Manipulated them. The office park was intended to be small—“but interesting!” the client had insisted—yet all she found herself able to do was build office boxes. She clad the boxes in mirrors, then switched to stone. Ugly boxes, regardless of face. Perfunctory. Nothing interesting… nothing that had come to her quickly. Like hauling a bag of bricks. Heavy _dumb_ bricks. Ones that had been built with over and over, not because they were useful and beautiful, but because no one ever was able to think their way away from them.

_Kissing her as if you were drunk in a shadow in a club_._ Kissing her like that in front of her **mother**. (Imagining that she kissed you the same way. No one would do that in front of their mother.)_

In that state of focused distraction, she heard her doorbell ring. And in that state, she opened her door.

No more distraction: for her focus was now on staring at the person she had so lately kissed (as if drunk in a shadow in a club).

TBC

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> original part 5 tumblr tags: you know what's funny?, the things we do for love, I bought flowers for my lovely wife today, because you need to show how much you appreciate your nearest and dearest, particularly when they say 'yes go do your ridiculous thing', and anyway, as I mentioned above, people like flowers


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here are some more words, most of which are completely frivolous. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, but just for the purposes of the ongoing “this is why”: I really do think it’s worth my time to continue to create narratives featuring characters who would, in an ideal world, be embodied by actors who convincingly embodied similarly named characters on a TV show some time ago. I don’t think we’re done yet. We’ll see how all the variables shake out, but I don’t think we’re done yet.

“Why are you here?” Helena managed to speak.

“I wanted to say thank you,” Myka said. She didn’t move.

“You’re welcome,” Helena said back, willing herself not to move either. Thus there they both stood, not moving. After a time, Helena ventured, “But why are you here _now_? What did you tell your mother?”

“I didn’t tell her anything.”

This struck Helena as absurd. “Did you _sneak out_?”

“Of course not. Who sneaks out of their own apartment? I just… left quietly. I wrote her a note.”

“What did the note say?”

A pause, a look. Myka was very still. “What do you want it to have said?”

Helena looked down, at Myka’s mouth, and thought of how her store of worldly knowledge now included the feeling of kissing that mouth. How her store of worldly knowledge could only be enhanced by having more examples upon which to render any judgments regarding that feeling. She looked up, into Myka’s green, green eyes. _Don’t do it_, an angel warned. _Go on_, whispered its corresponding devil. Trying to dismiss that devil, she said aloud, “My impulses tend to steer me into trouble.”

Myka smiled gentle, sweet. Then she chuckled. “That would be a really weird thing for me to write to my mother.”

“And I don’t want to drag you there with me,” Helena went on, determined.

“Getting weirder by the sentence.”

Helena concluded, “So it should have said ‘Be right back.’”

Myka didn’t confirm or deny; she resumed staring.

“Why are you here?” Helena tried again.

Myka breathed, a deep, closed-mouth inhale-exhale, as if she were preparing to lift a particularly heavy weight. At last she said, “I was curious.” And Helena thought, _Oh, of course, **now** here it comes_—but Myka laughed. “Not about that. Not like you’re thinking.”

“How do you know what I’m thinking?”

“You are so transparent.”

“I am not!”

“To me you are.”

How was it that they so often and effortlessly fell into speaking like this, as if they truly were what they were pretending to be? “If I’m so transparent, then what could you possibly be curious about.” To her own ears, she sounded petulant.

Now another conscious inhale, a studied exhale. “If you’ll kiss me like that when my mother’s watching… what will you do when she isn’t?”

All petulance fled.

Helena’s immediate thought: _Fast the first time—as if we really were drunk in that shadow. I would put my hands on you, and that would be that._

Helena’s spoken response: “Nothing.” But she said it with a dry mouth, for she had in that same immediacy remembered Myka’s _I bet you’re fast_.

“Should I believe you?” Not a demand, but an offering of a soft opportunity… for Helena to tell the truth.

But Helena had no choice but to give up that practice where Myka was concerned. No choice, and she knew it. Instead, she said, “I thought I was transparent. Can’t you tell?” When all she wanted was to remind Myka, “Of course you can tell. You already have.”

Another wordless stare.

Here they stood, in, or partially in, yet another tasteful foyer. No one’s mother was present, but even so. Helena said, in order to say something, “I am working hard at being good. I am good at working hard but horrible at being good. “

“That’s a conundrum.” Said slowly. As if she were _asking_ Helena to kiss that word from her mouth, taste it, swallow it.

Helena did swallow—a difficult push. “The ethics of the situation. The appearances. The possible consequences. Here we are.”

“Here we are. What if I said I don’t care about the ethics of the situation, or the appearances? The possible consequences…”

“As I believe I said to you previously, I’m not sure I should support your behaving in a way that is apparently wildly out of character.”

“And as I believe I said to you previously, you started it.”

“Didn’t we determine that H. pylori started it?”

“Oh, _now_ you want to blame the bacterium.”

“I want…” Helena began. She looked at Myka’s mouth again, and she thought, _If only she would push her way in. Understand these words for the weak non-barriers they are, ignore them, and push her way in._ The devil said, _If **she** does it, you are not responsible. If **she** does it, that is your defense. Provoke her, and you can have what you want. _The angel: _What a self-serving moral universe you live in. If someone else commits the initial sin, you haven’t sinned as well?_ Helena said aloud, “I _am_ blaming it. In its absence, we would have remained nothing but… professional associates.”

“Would we?” A lip-twist, one of the smallest and most shrewd. “I thought you said your impulses tended to steer you into trouble.”

_Don’t do **that** smile_, Helena wanted to tell her. _Actually, don’t do any of them_. “And as I also said, I don’t want to drag you there with me. I’ve already been the cause of one city official losing his job.” Keep talking, Helena told herself. Keep talking, and don’t think about how you want to go about stopping her talking or how you want her to stop your talking the same way. Just keep talking. “When this is all over. The project. We could sit down and—”

“You’ll have bid on something else by then. One big project, prove yourself; you’ll get more. That’s the _idea_.”

“I can’t predict the future. I can’t predict the future, but I am trying to do the right thing. For once.”

“I can’t predict the future either. But I want to do the right thing too. The _right_ thing.”

“When this is all over,” Helena said again, and maybe it was a plea that that would someday be true.

“When this is all over, it’s going to be beautiful,” Myka said.

“The neighborhood, you mean,” Helena said, trying to dismiss any other interpretation.

Myka leaned to Helena then, but she did not push her way in. She came close, and she let her lips skim the skin of Helena’s jawline—not a cheek-kiss. Something different. Something that seemed to want to speak about _when this is all over_.

But Helena knew, and she knew she needed to remember: _When this is all over, better that we didn’t. Because if we did, when **that** was all over, you would know what a mistake it had been. Because I haven’t changed._ How awful it would be, Helena felt, for Myka to look back and associate her with a mistake. She could associate Helena with strange hospital intimacy, that was fine; strange familial masquerade, that as well. She could consider Helena outside the norm, certainly. Not the usual run of cases. _Look back and remember me… look back and **like** to remember me_.

****

In the ensuing days and weeks, Helena occupied herself with all the activity that managing a large project required: seeing to a great many details, attending a great many meetings, shaking a great many hands. Explaining a great deal of logistics, obtaining a great deal of buy-in. Ignoring a great deal of everything that did not relate to details, meetings, logistics. Such an approach had always insulated her from the worst consequences of any ill-considered behavior. She remembered, from the aftermath of Giselle, the deep comfort she had taken in putting her shoulders to a massive yoke. The effort was familiar, but where was that comfort now?

She visited the neighborhood site with some frequency, ostensibly observing the progress, but in reality reminding herself of precisely what was meant to matter and what was not… people laboring to realize a vision. _Her_ vision. Her vision, the realization of which was resulting in those people’s continued employment.

“Are you okay?” Steve asked her on one such afternoon. They were regarding the initial framing of the walls of the community center, the model-piece of which still sat, undisturbed, on Helena’s desk. She had told herself that she would put it away once the structure was fully realized… of course she would. No doubt whatsoever. That was what she was waiting for. That was all.

She turned her back on the framing… unfortunately, that directed her gaze to the courtyard that no longer featured a fountain. “How exactly is one meant to balance all the things?” she asked Steve. “What if what you _want_, and, conversely, what you want—or what you have determined you really have no choice but to accept—which I suppose isn’t want, as such, but a resigning of oneself to a state of affairs—what if those are incompatible?”

“I didn’t follow that even a little. But I really think you’re fretting too much about this.”

Startled, Helena said, “How do you know about it?”

“The fountain? You’ve been ticked off since they nixed it. I’d have had to be in some sensory deprivation tank not to know.”

Helena tried not to sigh with relief. “It isn’t that. Or perhaps it is. I continue to wish… doesn’t it all feel incomplete? Without. It. The fountain.”

“You always say you’re fine with that kind of thing. It’s the most mindful stance you ever take.”

“That is what I always say,” Helena acknowledged. “It’s fine, and I will have to live with that. But it’s incomplete.”

“Do I even want to know what you’re really talking about?”

“No. It’s a good job, this one. This neighborhood.” _Refocus_, she told herself.

“Making a real difference,” Steve agreed. “I’m sure that’s why you’ve been walking around a _building_ site looking like everything’s falling down.”

“Don’t be philosophical.”

“I have a degree in philosophy,” he reminded her, as he was wont to do. “Besides, I’m pretty sure ‘How is it possible to balance all the things’ is a question only philosophy can answer.” He paused. “Maybe an engineer if you’re talking about balancing things in the physical world. Or a well-trained acrobat?”

“Perhaps I do need one of those. Philosophy certainly isn’t helping.”

“Might, if you’d actually say out loud what you need help with.”

“Better I don’t say it out loud,” Helena said, then heard “Say what out loud?” from directly behind her.

She whirled around to see Abigail Chow. In a hardhat, appropriate for the site of course, although Helena—who was also wearing one, as was Steve—did always feel the hat to be overly _costume_. As if she were _playing the part_ of an architect. “How ridiculous everyone looks in a hardhat,” she said to Abigail.

“Myka doesn’t look ridiculous in one. She looks cute.”

Helena struggled to utter a calm, “Does she.”

“Oh,” Steve said.

“Don’t ‘oh’ me,” Helena told him.

Abigail, with innocence that might have been real but struck Helena as unconvincing, asked, “Why is he ‘oh’-ing you?”

Steve answered her. “Uh… because I’m a philosopher?” Well, at least he tried.

Abigail nodded. “Say no more.”

“I have found,” Helena told her, “that telling that to a philosopher fails to produce the desired change in behavior.”

“I think my ‘oh’ was pretty succinct,” Steve said.

Helena conceded, though with a sulk, “I suppose you are also a Buddhist.”

“How can you be mad about Buddhism?” Abigail asked her. “You must really be in a mood. Hardhat-hair upsets you that much?”

Steve began, “She’s upset about—” Helena shot him a look, and he stumbled to, “The fountain. From the plans. Not being there.”

“Well. No doubt you know the koan,” Abigail said, and “oh lord no koans” Helena tried to say, but Abigail would not be deterred; with an extremely contented smirk, she said, “Slightly modified for my purposes here, but: first there is a fountain—”

And Steve _lit up_ in response. “Ha! Then there is no fountain.”

“Then there is,” Abigail finished. “Steve, marry me.”

“I think we’d both be happier if I didn’t, what with me being gay,” Steve said, but he continued to smile. “Plus wouldn’t that mean we have a personal relationship?”

Helena was not even tempted to smile. She said, “I have had my fill of hearing about that ridiculous rule. It makes no sense at all! What is a personal relationship?”

Abigail shrugged. “A slippery slope that starts with coffee, as I understand it.” She knocked her knuckles against Helena’s hardhat. “Or maybe bacteria? I’m no expert.”

“Everything starts with bacteria,” Helena muttered.

“And ends with what?” Steve asked.

Abigail shrugged again. “I thought you were supposed to be the philosopher. But let’s see… Helena, what do you like for breakfast?”

“Grapefruit,” Helena uttered, as darkly as she could.

And Abigail shrugged yet again. “So, maybe that. I’ll let Myka know.”

Helena resisted the urge to raise her tablet and whack Abigail’s hardhat. “Why am I here?” she inquired of the universe.

“That’s definitely a question for Steve,” Abigail, or perhaps the universe via Abigail, responded.

“She never likes the answers I give,” Steve sighed.

“She should. Anyone who knows ‘first there is a mountain’ has some pretty good ones, I’m betting. Plus you’re adorable. Are you sure you don’t want to marry me?”

“I have a boyfriend. Haven’t I told you that already?”

“Not that I recall, but I bet he’s adorable too.”

“I think so. We’re talking about moving in together.”

“I hope you do. And I hope by then you’ve quit working for Helena, so you can invite me to the housewarming party.”

Helena said, and it was true, “If Steve quits, nothing at all will find itself built. And given that you’ve proposed to him, aren’t you the one at fault for pushing your relationship in that inappropriately personal direction?”

“Well, you’d know,” Abigail said. “But bear in mind that if I get kicked off the project too, you’re either out the door or stuck with my boss, and that’s a devil/deep blue sea proposition, or probably vice versa, because she’s a killer.”

“Literally?” Steve asked. Now he was the startled one.

“Let’s not find out,” Abigail told him.

Helena said, “No, let’s. She could put me out of my misery.”

“Cheer up,” Abigail told her. “I know you’re sad about ‘the fountain,’ but look at it this way: maybe you’re just in the ‘there is no grapefruit’ stage of your practice.”

“We might have to wait a long time for ‘then there is,’” Steve said. “She’s not good at reconciling paradoxes.”

Helena sank back into her sulk. “They resemble conundrums.”

“Conundra,” Abigail said.

“_What. Ever,_” Helena gritted out, and she considered the minimal extent to which she was likely to miss her tablet if she broke it across Abigail’s hard-hatted head.

As if she sensed Helena’s impulse, Abigail removed her hardhat and polished its crown against her sleeve. “You never know. Enlightenment—and personal relationships!—could be right around the corner.”

“They are not,” Helena said. Some devil was having fun with her. “They had better not be.”

But some devil continued to have fun with Helena, for not a week later she was at City Hall, rushing to make a meeting with a group of civil engineers, and she spotted a quite familiar conundrum emerging from around a corner, a long hallway away. Helena was caught: should she hurry into the meeting room, thus removing herself from a very tempting situation, or should she linger? Surely they could say hello; no one could object to a greeting. An _impersonal_ greeting.

She lingered: one beat, waiting for two, waiting for Myka to make her way down the hall. But Myka instead looked down at the folder she held, stopped moving, then reversed course. She disappeared back around that same corner.

Perhaps she had not even seen Helena… but perhaps she had. Perhaps she had, and perhaps she had now wisely decided that she did care about appearances and consequences.

And perhaps this was that “next stage” that Steve and Abigail had been nattering about: Helena would no longer have to work hard at all at being good, if there no longer happened to be any chance that she would weaken and fail. She supposed she should thank Myka for turning away, regardless of her motivation. But of course she could not thank Myka, not for that or anything else… for she would have a difficult time keeping such thanks from becoming _very_ personal.

****

Very late on a subsequent Friday evening, Helena received a call from Abigail. “This seems a rather _personal_ time to call,” Helena told her, thinking to tease.

“Yeah,” Abigail said, with a tired heaviness—it was appropriate for the hour, but uncharacteristic. Then she asked, “So does that mean you heard?”

“Heard what? Are you all right?” Then a horrible thought: “Is Myka all right?” Preparing to dash for her car, drive to the hospital—

“It’d be a good idea if you never asked that again.”

“_What is wrong?_”

Abigail sighed. Abigail was not given to sighs. “A lot of things are fun and games. You know, _until_. But we had this big huge staff meeting this afternoon, practically everybody on the org chart—end of day Friday, of course, so everybody’s got the weekend to cool off—about how somebody in the finance department could have been fired today, but wasn’t.”

“Why does that call for a staff meeting?”

“Because of why he could’ve been fired. See, he’s a single dad. And he met a nice lady at his kid’s school’s PTA meeting a couple weeks ago.”

“That seems… not a firing offense.”

“Turns out she’s a big-deal CPA with the firm that audits and certifies our annual report.”

“He was threatened with firing because they said hello at a PTA meeting?”

“No. Because they slept together after that PTA meeting.”

“Oh,” Helena said, and in response to Abigail’s audible exhale, she added, “so why wasn’t he in fact fired?”

“Because they didn’t check each other’s résumés before they did it. So they claim.”

“And that claim was deemed plausible?”

“Anyway the point of my story is, it was a public shaming. There’s ethics and there’s ethics, I guess, and exposing people’s extremely private business in order to deter other people from bad-behavior business is something we’ve got no problem with.”

“But surely that’s actionable, to expose someone like that. Publicly.”

“Maybe so. But even if you can sue afterward, the humiliation still happened.” Abigail paused. “So I also want to take this opportunity to point out that Myka’s still not really over how awful she feels about her blood-and-guts meeting with just the two of you.”

“You’d like me to put two and two together,” Helena said. Abigail didn’t say anything, so Helena went on, “Because you want to make sure that nothing like a public shaming ever happens to her.”

“Fun and games. Until. It’s not that I wouldn’t rather hassle you sunup to sundown, but I don’t want anybody who isn’t in on the joke to get the wrong idea. And not to get too personal right here right now, but if you actually do care about her at all, I just think—”

“No.”

“You don’t actually care about her?”

“No, I mean ‘no, I won’t let that happen to her.’” Helena looked at the model-piece on her desk. She considered the strong wind against which the poor trees fought. “Of course I care about her. And before you warn me: no, I won’t let anyone else hear me say that.”

“Thanks.”

“What I will do is ask to see a résumé if I meet anyone new,” Helena said. It would certainly be just like her to actively reject something she wanted, in order to head off a suite of problems, only to crash obliviously through the door of an identically appointed suite.

“Planning on going out?”

“I think you know me well enough to know that isn’t likely to be true.” And she supposed that if she kept to that, no problems of that sort could ever arise again. A monkishly easy solution.

“I don’t know you at all,” Abigail said, with another sigh. “As far as anybody’s concerned, I don’t know you at all.”

Helena assured her, “I don’t know you either.” Abigail would most likely recover her good nature, once this pulse of pessimism had faded, but the news was nevertheless sobering. “Perhaps I _will_ start going out,” she said, just to make herself feel worse.

“Who could blame you?” Abigail gloomed.

Myka could… but Helena had been foolish to hold out any sort of hope. And if she had been wishing for some continuation of their charade, no matter how farcical? Well, as Abigail had said, a lot of things were fun and games. Until.

****

Monday morning: _early_ Monday morning. A fresh start. A correct start. Even the model trees seemed more upright. Helena beheld them with clear purpose; the community center would be completed in not very long.

Her telephone rang, and “Hi,” she heard from it, after a tree-distracted swipe. It had been flat on the desk, on speaker, but she immediately snatched it up, lest anyone happen to walk into her office and recognize the voice emanating from it.

“What do you think you are doing?” she demanded.

“Is that a trick question? I think I’m making a phone call,” Myka said.

“I know you were in that staff meeting Abigail told me about. I know it. Can you credibly claim that you failed to process that information? Or that you forgot it, between Friday evening and this morning? You cannot possibly have developed amnesia over the weekend. Can we say that you called me in error? Would anyone find that plausible? For that is what you _must have done_.” Stalling, backpedaling, trying to disguise her joy at hearing Myka’s voice. Trying to be stern in the face of that joy, for she had spent the weekend _getting over it_. Putting it behind her. But now here it was, in her ear and not all behind her, here as if Myka were here right beside her, in fact, speaking _directly_ into her ear. If Helena imagined carefully enough, she could feel Myka’s breath.

“No, I’m pretty sure I hit all the right numbers. Given that you’re exactly the person I want to talk to.”

Her voice her voice her voice: exactly the sound Helena wanted to hear. But she said, “No, I’m not.”

“Yes, you are,” Myka responded, and Helena could hear her smile. “Because I need your help again. Don’t worry; no one will know.”

“I should tell you no.” Making that clear to herself as well as to Myka.

“You should,” Myka agreed. “Or just hang up on me.”

Helena did consider it. Semi-seriously. That consideration stretched into a great pause. “Why am I not doing that?”

Myka herself took an even greater pause. As if she could come up with no real reason? But then she said, “Because you think you should help me. Everything else aside, you think you should help me.”

_I think I can only hurt you._ “I saved your life, so now I’m responsible for you?” She tried to make it sound dismissive.

“No… wouldn’t that make Rick responsible for me?”

Of all the things Myka could have said, that was exactly right or exactly wrong, but in any case it made Helena leap to an indignant, “He certainly is not.”

“Then I think that leaves you.”

“Fine.” She said it quickly, but she knew she should not have been so eager to agree. Not now, when it was clearly no longer fun and games. But perhaps Myka was right: no one would know… “When and where? Is it your mother again?” And surely Myka’s mother would be safe enough…

“This time it’s just Rick.” _Lovely,_ Helena sneered in her head. “He’s got a new girlfriend, another resident at the hospital, and he wants me to meet her. And obviously it would make no sense for me to meet her without you there too.”

“No sense,” Helena echoed. It was her most truly sensical utterance in, she felt, some time, so she repeated it: “No sense. So you and Rick are… what _are_ you and Rick? Friends?”

“Honestly? Two people who’ve known each other since elementary school and started remembering that that was the important part. Not the stupid mistakes.”

“I suppose I can respect that. And support it.” And thus she talked herself fully into—well, into whatever it was she was going to do. “Also I suppose I’m pleased to know that he has a girlfriend, so perhaps he’ll ease off the digs at me.”

Such a trifling thing to express concern about, but it made Myka laugh. “You can take it. You’re tough.”

“I _can_ take it. I don’t believe I should have to.” But Helena said these words while entirely preoccupied by the way Myka said “You’re tough.” Amused and familiar, with a little (possibly) flirty push on the word _tough_.

“I’ll give him a stern talking-to about it. How’s that?” Another little (possibly) flirty push, here on the word _that_.

“Do it in my presence and you have a deal.” Helena could easily see this reward being worth the risk. How stupidly telling.

“Wholly done. So I’ll see you? This Saturday, around six?”

“You will. Against my better judgment.”

“Against anything you want. Your better judgment, a wall—”

“All odds,” Helena interrupted. “Interpretation. The grain, the clock, the law.” Against anything but a wall, because dear god, imagining herself and Myka…

“The tide,” Myka said, and Helena breathed out. But then Myka added, “Pretty futile.”

****

Helena didn’t speak often with her brother. Charles still lived in England, and neither he nor she traveled across the ocean with any great frequency; nor were they particularly adept at managing the time-zone problems that stood in the way of technologically mediated speech. They engaged in occasional spates of email exchanges, during which they would send lengthy discussions of some topic back and forth daily for a week, or even two, but then one or the other would be overtaken by demands on her or his time, and the conversation would snap wherever it happened to snap.

So she knew when she called him, as she did not long after agreeing to Myka’s latest scheme, that he would understand that she understood the call to be as much a distress signal as a treat—although it was certainly as much the latter as the former. She was thus not surprised by his first words upon answering: “If you have a terminal disease, tell me at once.”

“I do not have a terminal disease,” she reported. “Other than life itself, from which we all suffer.”

“Excellent news. Or tragic, I suppose, terminal as we all are. Have you committed a crime?”

“Not to the best of my knowledge. Wait, I take it back: I do still drive too fast, always, so yes, I have committed near-continual moving violations. Are those criminal?”

“No idea. But you haven’t been caught. Lately, that is.”

“No, as yet only the once.”

“So why are we talking? In this dramatic, real-time, voice-to-voice fashion? In what predicament do we find ourselves?”

“We find ourselves wanting to ask you a question,” she said.

“I don’t see how that’s a predicament.”

“It isn’t. The question is related to the predicament.”

“Am I part of the predicament?”

“I certainly hope not.”

“Then ask away.”

Helena had composed her question with care: “How did you fall in love with Jane?” she asked.

“I don’t believe falling in love is a ‘how’ question.”

_I love my brother_, Helena reminded herself. “Trust you to dispute the premise. What sort of question is it then?”

“A yes or no. So I’ll ask you: Have you fallen in love? Yes or no?”

Helena weighed possible ways of answering. None of them involved “yes” or “no.”

“Well?” Charles prodded.

“Here is how this is meant to go,” Helena told him. “You explain how you fell in love with Jane, and I say ‘What an enormous relief! That isn’t what happened in my case; ergo, I have not fallen in love.’”

“I suspect there are as many ‘what happened’ stories surrounding falling in love as there are stars in the sky. Sorry, that was a cliché. What else is unimaginably numerous?”

Helena sighed. “Bacteria in a colony. Growing in a nonexistent fountain.”

“Have you been drinking?”

“I don’t know what to do,” Helena said.

“First, whoever she is, give her my regards. Second, give her my sympathy. But third, tell me all about how beautiful she is—incidentally, why haven’t you sent a photo?—and detail all the ways she is everything you ever dreamed of but for which you never dared wish, for fear that—”

“Stop. She _is_ beautiful. We can leave it at that. I certainly never thought to dream of her.”

Now Charles sighed. “Similarly, I never thought to dream of Jane.”

“You were not attending when I explained how this is meant to go.”

“Pfft. Attending when you explain how any thing is _meant to go_, what would be the point of that? Now tell me all.”

So she did. Plans and models and blood and fountains; hospitals and fiancées and cancer and mothers. The intended next deception. “And so now, again,” she concluded, “I find myself in the position of having to pretend to be pretending to be something I in fact already am.”

“I am so happy that all Jane and I had to work through, at the moment of our beginning, was that minor traffic accident.”

“She completely destroyed your car.”

Charles, still cheerful, said, “As far as I can ascertain, from my story and now yours, destructive capability is what a Wells looks for in a woman. We tell ourselves pretty stories about beauty and intellect, when what we really want is a wrecking ball.”

“Beauty and intellect are certainly not lacking, in Jane’s case or Myka’s.”

“I’m not saying we find them unnecessary. Just not sufficient.”

When they said their goodbyes, he chided her again for not having sent a photo. “I don’t have one,” she told him. She did not want to direct him to the news photos—she had looked at them more than once since the hospital, and every time she did, their unrepresentative nature struck her anew. If Charles saw them, he would get the wrong idea… not that it mattered one way or the other what idea he got, but it would do Myka an injustice.

“In this age of incessant representation? Come now.”

“She’s private,” Helena said.

“Find a way.”

Helena thought, _I would like to. I would like to hold in my hands a great number of truly representative photos of her and gaze upon them. I would like to gaze upon **her**, never mind the photos. And do more than gaze… but I should not be thinking about this. Why is my brother so unhelpful?_

“Why are you so unhelpful?” she asked aloud.

He pounced. “Aha! Yet another symptom: an inability to see how helpful others are in fact being. _I_ thought _you_ extremely unhelpful when you advised me to simply tell Jane that I wanted to see her again, rather than undertake my elaborate plan to get her attention by destroying _her_ car in return.”

“I have no elaborate plan to destroy Myka’s car.”

“Make one at once, so I can talk you out of it.”

“You are _useless_.”

“But mar-ried to the wo-man of my dree-eams,” he sing-songed. “Those dreams I never thought to dream.”

“Useless.”

“Married!”

“Poor Jane. Give her my love.”

“And give Myka mine! She sounds lovely. Also send a photo, so I can judge for myself.”

“There is no reason for me to do that.”

“The quite compelling reason is that your unhelpful, useless brother has requested that you do so. Tell her that and take her picture, you coward.”

But doing so would mean revealing to Myka that she had spoken with her unhelpful, useless brother _about_ Myka. That was a capitulation to reality that Helena could not allow.

She envisioned it nonetheless, again and again: “Smile,” she would say, and smile was what Myka would do. And “Why?” was what Myka would ask, but she would not cease from smiling, even as Helena explained about her unhelpful, useless brother… and Helena also envisioned, again and again and yet again, how Myka would smile once more, once more and not cease, on an imaginary future day when Helena offered the real explanation: _Because I never thought to dream of you_.

TBC

Note: I tried mightily to work into this part a joke about, or at least a reference to, the fact that the 1967 song “There Is a Mountain,” which incorporates “First there is a mountain; then there is no mountain; then there is,” is by Donovan. Given that Claudia isn’t a character here, I figured I could manage some sort of complicated shout-out… but I was tying the Abigail-Steve-Helena conversation in extra knots trying to get there, so here it is in a note instead. The song itself is pretty trippy, and it probably necessitates some careful thinking about cultural appropriation (and whether flutes were really quite _that_ necessary in late-60s pop arrangements); also I probably should have resisted my “first there is a fountain” not-exactly-joke regardless, but I do mean it to be more meaningful than it may at first appear. I generally mean a lot of things to be more meaningful than they may at first appear.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> original part 6 tumblr tags: we humans are always getting ourselves into predicaments, in which we want two contradictory things to be true, but a lot of things happen in due time, I ran across an old page of notes the other day, I can't even remember what project it was for, but one quotation said the following:, 'the universe's delays are not the universe's denials', and I'm trying to take that to heart, even though it is at the same time true, that urgent action is often necessary, so as is additionally true in life, a lot comes down to categories, and determining what goes where


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hate having to disclaimer on the basis of real-life work, but here is my disclaimer: I have a lot of real-life work, so this part may seem a little thin. It’s more like the first half of a two-part part, but I have no wherewithal to get the second half of it into shape, and half of a thing is better than none of it, unless you’re talking about, say, an appendectomy. Or any piece of machinery, really, because what good would half a lawnmower do you? So what I’ve learned, in writing this intro, is that a story conceptually resembles a sandwich more than it does a lawnmower. Or a root canal. I mean, I hope so. I am clearly very tired right now, which seems like the perfect time to turn my attention back to writing words for money. (P.S. I realized, well after I had come up with the character of Rick’s girlfriend, that some might be inclined to cast that role a particular way, given the blond guy’s previous job. I swear I didn’t have her in mind, but if she works for you…)

_This is becoming a habit_, Helena thought as she stood at Myka’s door, flowers in hand.

But really, could any behavior constitute a “habit” when it had been performed only once before? And she had come bearing two bouquets that once before, so this time was observably different… although the total _number_ of flowers was, she had to admit, something close to similar—well, she couldn’t very well let Rick think she was in any way less committed to her performance. They should have had a secret handshake, she and Rick, a yes-I-am-still-lifting-the-Volkswagen handshake.

“Just a minute,” she heard Myka call, and “No hurry,” she responded, so that Myka would know it was she and not Rick. So that perhaps Myka would find herself pleased that this person at the door happened to be she. And not Rick.

Some habits, Helena reasoned—because she had to do something to occupy herself, and so why not reason?—were healthy. For example, looking at nature. But standing at Myka’s door and holding more flowers than hands of moderate size could comfortably carry most likely did not rate as one of the healthier… the flowers were at least _representative_ of nature, however, and Helena reckoned it would in fact be more beneficial to her long-term health for her to spend the evening looking at them than for her to spend it gazing in futile non-pretended pretense at Myka.

She was deviating from form a bit in any case, in that this time she had brought Myka a book as well. She had, two days ago, thought to bring only the book, but she had imagined being right here, having knocked, waiting to be let in, holding a flat, inadequate book in her hands. Two-dimensionality: it seemed too minimal, and certainly not legible as any sort of artistic minimal_ism_. So now she held aggressively three-dimensional flowers, and the book bided its thin time in her bag.

Myka pulled the door open and, before her eyes met Helena’s, immediately launched a “Sorry, sorry, sorry…” litany. But then their eyes did meet, and Myka fell silent and still. Helena suspected that she was having a reaction similar to Helena’s own: a realization that they hadn’t been near each other since that night when Helena had acted the prudent fool and sent Myka away. That, coupled with a similar realization that standing and looking was itself a pleasure in which they could, right now, indulge.

Helena had the same thought that she had had the first time she’d stood here, staring: that Myka looked well. This time, she looked genuinely, entirely well and not just comparatively so. “You look so well,” she said, and Myka’s smile said that she remembered. “And beautiful,” Helena added, because she could, and because Myka did—alive and bright, face flushed from hurry, from something in the kitchen, from… excitement? Anticipation?

“That’s even better than looking well. Your hands are full again,” Myka said..

“They are.”

This time the handoff was easy; Myka took the flowers in both her hands and breathed into them, closing her eyes. Then she looked back up at Helena, not staring but gazing. “I knew it was the kind of thing you did,” she said. “Since my mother isn’t here. There’s no need to impress her.” She stepped back, and Helena crossed the threshold.

“I know,” Helena said, then let herself lean closer to Myka and whisper, “which is why I’ve brought you a book as well. Because she isn’t here to frown upon it.”

“That’s just me. She thinks I’m being lazy, giving books.”

“Feel free.”

“I kind of do,” Myka said, and she paused… with significance? To give Helena an opportunity to speculate as to whether she were saying something more general about freedom? But then she went on, “Because that’s what I got for you this time too. I don’t have it out here, though.”

Helena tried not to let her curiosity show. “That’s all right. Set the flowers down, and we’ll do mine.” She hadn’t wrapped the book in paper. That seemed too formal, and besides Myka had not wrapped the Wallace. So Helena handed her this new offering face down, as a physical reprise.

Myka smiled at that, too. She turned over the thin, flat, nearly square hardback and read aloud, from the cover, “The King’s Fountain, by Lloyd Alexander.” She looked up again. “A children’s book?”

“It is about a fountain that is not built,” Helena said. “Abigail and Steve discovered a spiritual affinity and were koan-ing me over it. The fountain, I mean. The one we are not building.”

“Is ‘to koan’ really a verb? “

“It is when they _do_ it,” Helena said, very nearly falling into a renewed pout as she recalled it.

“To you,” Myka said. The smile was in her voice rather than on her face.

“To me.”

“Poor baby. My list of people I need to chew out for being mean to you is getting longer and longer.” Now Myka was looking at her with that indulgence. “Poor baby,” she repeated, as if that were what she had said to Helena for years, in just these sorts of situations, to tease but also to soothe.

Helena cleared her throat. “I tried to find something that also featured children who did not exist but could not combine the two, and this is at the very least beautifully illustrated.”

Myka looked at the book again. “The cover’s lovely. Oh, Ezra Jack Keats. I didn’t know he and Alexander ever collaborated.”

“I’m surprised I’ve managed to bring you new information.”

“I’m not. I bet you know all kinds of things I don’t.”

“In any case,” Helena hurried to say, “in the course of my attempts, I’ve come to realize that children who do not exist and yet are beautiful are indeed conceptually unsettling. Rivaling lobsters in their ability to invade the REM sleep.”

“I thought you didn’t have anxiety dreams about fairy children.”

“I _hadn’t_.”

“Poor baby,” Myka said again.

_Now_ they found themselves stuck looking at each other. _If only the situation were not as it is. She is beautiful and it **is** a yes or no, curse my useless and unhelpful brother, and it is **unfair** that the situation is as it is._

Myka broke the gaze by glancing down again at the book. “I guess I see what you mean about being focused on your work.”

_You idiot_, Helena reproached herself, _you gave her something about the project. With which she is not in fact involved anymore! All you ever think about is your own—_

“Because it clearly took some work, and some focus, for you to come up with this. Unless you had it sitting around.”

“Would that be more or less impressive to you?” Helena asked, and she hadn’t intended it to be serious, that question, but she realized she meant it. So that she could take care, in some imaginary future, to have the right incipient gifts sitting around, if that would in fact be more impressive to Myka. It seemed very important that Myka should be impressed. _Or I will do work and focus on finding the right gifts_.

“I don’t care,” Myka said. The saying of “care” left her mouth a bit open, and Helena felt drunk in that club again.

Instead of moving to take advantage of that—the feeling, the open mouth—she said, “When are Rick and his girlfriend meant to arrive?”

“Any minute now. But I wish—”

And there was the knock.

That man’s timing. “Don’t answer,” Helena wanted to say. If Rick hadn’t already known the truth—which knowledge made her force herself to tap her ethical brakes—she might have seized Myka and kissed her senseless, so that she could have answered the door completely, and convincingly, disarranged. “To sell it,” she could have said to that surprised, well-kissed Myka, who would have been kissed particularly well, and particularly thoroughly, because this time, her mother would not have been watching.

And thus it was an enormous surprise when Myka seized _her_ instead, by the arms, with just enough insistence to her grip that Helena read it easily as letting her decide whether to stay in the embrace. “To sell it,” Myka might as well have said, because what she did say was, “Answering the door, wouldn’t we both be breathless? If we’re not, it’s fine, but wouldn’t we—” And Helena had to agree: yes, yes they would; if this were real they would be breathless all the time; Helena could not imagine any reason to take up breathing again; it seemed a very unhealthy habit, and kissing was clearly so much better for anyone’s health. Everyone’s…

Not until the second knock—well, but it could have been the third, the thirteenth, or thirtieth or thirty-thousandth for all Helena knew—did Myka pull back. This foyer had to have some sort of drunk-club-shadow spell on it, Helena thought as she tried to remember how to pretend to be a self-possessed individual. Then again the intoxicating agent might have been the allure of the forbidden or the unreal or beauty in a concentrated form… but then yet again, perhaps simple pleasure, the sort derived from doing something based on _I like it_. Even if it required disregarding consequences in the long term—as with smoking or sunbathing or drinking something overly sugared _and_ alcoholic—the reason might still be the uncomplication of _I like it_.

Kissing Myka: a simple pleasure with consequences that would not come in this moment. And so the _now_ of it was part of the pleasure as well… a deep, cobalt hum of _right this minute_…

…but now Myka was opening the door. She did at least leave one arm mostly around Helena as she leaned to do that; Rick, revealed as the door swung in, saw their proximity, then looked at Helena and thinned his lips. Helena raised an eyebrow at him. Perhaps that was the secret handshake… “Volkswagen,” she was tempted to say.

With him was a beautiful woman of Indian descent, and Rick’s face changed yet again as he looked at her. “This is Varsha,” he said to Helena and Myka. “Dr. Parekh, that is. Varsha, this is Myka, and also Helena, who she’s going to marry, I guess.” That “I guess” dig… Helena was not ashamed, in her own head, to admit that she was looking forward to the promised dressing-down.

Varsha could not have differed more from Myka: she was small rather than tall, but not delicate, instead contained, with what Helena imagined was the potential energy of a grenade. She also seemed, in any case and by any measure, out of Rick’s league, whatever Rick’s league might have been, and in that, she and Myka were entirely alike, as an objectively judged matter, setting aside how prettily Myka’s face rhymed with Rick’s. Helena let stand unanswered any questions about whether her own league was located anywhere near Myka’s vicinity. As a matter judged objectively or otherwise.

Varsha said, her tone making quite clear that she expected no nonsense, “Now which one of you ladies is which? I generally don’t bother with white faces if they don’t belong to patients. And your hair’s the same, so that won’t help.”

Helena looked at Myka’s hair—no, it continued to differ from her own. She said, “But mine is straight, while Myka’s is curly.”

“Sorry, I don’t see it. But if that one’s Myka, you’re Helena. Right, I’ll keep you in mind as the one my grandma would hate.”

“Because…?” Helena prompted.

“You have an English accent,” Varsha said.

Helena squinted at her. “_You_ have an English accent.”

“But I look like her granddaughter and you look like the fellow who was magistrate in her town in Gujarat until she was twelve.”

“Ah. I see. I’m sorry.” _Well done,_ Helena scolded herself.

Varsha shrugged. “The point is: hate.” She gestured at Helena. “But my grandma, she thinks Americans are fine. So: like,” she said, and made a similar gesture at Myka. An unusual benediction, with Myka getting the best of it.

Myka said to Helena, “At least you’ve got a distinguishing characteristic, even if it’s historically irredeemable.” She asked Varsha, “And what’s Rick’s?”

“He doesn’t have one!” Varsha exclaimed. “He’s the most generic American white person I’ve ever seen. He’s like wall-colored wallpaper. It’s a genetic achievement of some kind.”

Helena didn’t bother to disguise her wide grin, but Myka’s face couldn’t decide how it wanted to react. “Do you _like_ him at all?” she asked, and her tone was… protective. That struck Helena harder than a koan-ing ever could.

“Like him? I want to put him in a museum. Under glass.” Her eyes were shining, and Helena didn’t doubt her at all.

It prompted Helena to say, “It’s the strangest thing… I feel the same way about Myka. For a somewhat different reason, but even so.” She’d never expected to utter that truth aloud, but yes, she wanted to place Myka, or perhaps it was that she always half-expected to _find_ Myka, under a bell jar. Someone should always already have taken this necessary measure to preserve her tenuity.

“Specimens,” Varsha said to Helena, with a decisive nod.

Myka remarked to Rick, “I don’t think they actually need us here at all.”

“I’m _sure_ Varsha doesn’t need me at all,” Rick said, “here or anywhere else. I mean it’s pretty much a miracle that her eyes don’t just run right past me all the time. I can’t imagine she’ll stay with me. But even if it’s just for a minute, you know?” Helena watched his eyes meet Myka’s; she watched him frown. “Should I not say things like that to you?”

Myka quirked a corner of her mouth. “It’s okay. I’m over the active wishing for you to be unhappy. Plus I kind of feel that way about mine, too.”

Helena felt it would be best if she did not process that statement. Or dwell upon it. But it did make her wish she could apologize to Myka for having had the traitorous thought that her words could outstrip the torment of a koan-ing…

Well, why couldn’t she? “I apologize,” she said to Myka.

“What did you do?”

“It would take too long, and be inappropriate, for me to explain.”

“Are you pre-apologizing for something that’s going to happen? Are you, for example, about to hit me in the face with a pie? Because that’s the kind of thing I’d want an apology for. Both before and after the fact. Even if you feel like you really have to throw that pie.” Myka said this last bit with great seriousness.

Helena asked her, with commensurate seriousness because Myka was not smiling, “Why would I feel like I ‘really have to’ throw a pie? In any case, I don’t see how I could be about to do such a thing now. I don’t have a pie.”

“That bouquet of flowers on the table is quite large,” Varsha said, in a seeming non sequitur. “Who was trying to impress whom?”

Then Helena fell in love with that non sequitur, for Myka said, “Isn’t it _something_? And my mother isn’t even here.”

“My point,” said Varsha, “is that it’s easily large enough to be hiding a pie of some sort. She could be leaping for it any second.”

_I am a little less in love_, Helena thought, _now that it is no longer a non sequitur_.

Myka said, “I guess it’s not quite as impressive when you put it that way. Or maybe,” she tilted her head one way, then the other, “even more? But anyway I like the way you think, Varsha.”

“I like the way you became ill,” Varsha said.

That made Myka tilt her head again. “Thanks?”

“MALToma’s a personal favorite of mine. I studied all your labs.”

“Then I guess I like the fact that I… gave you the opportunity?”

Helena harrumphed. “So much for privacy, Rick?”

“You try telling her no,” Rick said.

At that, Helena snorted out a small laugh, and she echoed Myka: “I feel that way about mine, too.” Rewarded: Myka, who had overheard, directed a brilliant smile her way.

Varsha said, “One doesn’t often _get_ such an opportunity. So challenging, your case. And of course the H. pylori. Whose favorite _isn’t_ it?”

“Now you’re trying to stump me,” Myka accused.

“Pretty nearly stumped _me_,” Rick said. “The MALToma, I mean. Why couldn’t it just have been bleeding ulcers?”

Varsha waved a hand at him. “Please. You needed a challenge. Bleeding ulcers would have been too simple.”

“Perhaps less destructive,” Helena offered.

“I’m _sorry_,” Myka said. “I keep telling you I’ll pay for—”

“I meant _to you_,” Helena told her.

And she was rewarded again, with the renewal of that brilliant smile, as Myka said, “Oh. That’s really sweet then.”

****

Helena decided, after a span of observation over the meal, that she liked Varsha. Liked Rick better with Varsha. He was besotted in a way that seemed genuine, a way that she recognized… although she was jealous. No ethics guidelines kept the two of _them_ apart.

Myka, meanwhile, clearly more than liked Varsha: they had found an absurd affinity, or an affinity of absurdity, but in any case it seemed to relate particularly to the practice of medicine, or rather to discoveries relevant to the practice of medicine. They had started with the establishment of H. pylori as the cause of ulcers—“He ingested it intentionally,” Varsha enthused of the researcher who had done the establishing, “drank it right down!”—and then moved on to the accidental discovery of penicillin, and thence to other antibiotics, particularly the ones Myka had taken to rid her of her own troublesome H. pylori; Varsha attempted to persuade Myka that drug synthesis was every bit as miraculous as a serendipitous mess on a lab bench.

“But accidents,” Myka said.

“But intentions,” Varsha countered. “Without which you could not have been treated effectively. Synthesized antibiotics! And did you not hear me say that Marshall drank the bacterial cocktail intentionally?”

Helena, who had not contributed to the conversation in some time, said to Rick, who had not either, “Speaking of drinking, I certainly hope you’re the one driving.”

“You too, buddy,” Rick shot back, but he didn’t seem to mean it meanly; they were in odd accord, watching the women with whom they were besotted drink wine together and talk about bacteria.

Varsha eventually worked her way back around to the joys of the genus Helicobacter: “Those, they’re sneaky. Hiding from stomach acid in the mucosal layer, producing just enough urease to raise the local pH, doing their hole-and-corner mischief.”

Rick said, “Seems appropriate, somehow, doesn’t it, Myka?”

“Don’t get cute, mister,” Myka warned. “I swear I will tape your mouth shut.”

This did not seem to be the reprimand she had promised Helena, or even its beginning, yet the atmosphere had, in an instant, shifted significantly. Myka was glaring at Rick with intent of some sort, and Varsha said, perhaps as a way of breaking the sudden tension, “I think you mean ‘don’t get cute, doctor.’”

“Won’t matter once I’ve taped his mouth shut. Which I swear I will do.”

“You could hit him in the face with a pie,” Varsha said.

“I will do it, if he doesn’t shut it. I mean it, Rick.”

“I don’t understand what is happening,” Helena said. Something was being referenced that Helena had no access to, something distinct from childhood reminiscence.

Myka breathed in and out, clearly attempting to shake off whatever strange interaction had just occurred. She said to Helena, “Well, I can tell you what _isn’t_ happening, if that’ll help: you’re not eating lobster.”

“I’ll cling to that,” Helena said. “As something that is objectively true.” _As something that does not require interpretation of undercurrents._

Rick raised his hands in Myka’s direction: clearly an apology. Then he said to Helena, “It might not be objectively true. She might be messing with you. I mean, just about that. Maybe she snuck some lobster in the salad dressing. It was a little… different.”

“Quit impugning my cooking,” Myka said, but she had evidently decided to forgive him.

“I didn’t say it was bad.”

Varsha said, “If it weren’t objectively true, my mast cells would have started producing histamines. I’m allergic to shellfish.”

“I fear their vengeance,” Helena said.

“Immunologically distinct,” Varsha informed her. “The responses, I mean—allergic and phobic. And yet the avoidance behaviors, quite similar.”

“Great,” Myka grumbled. “Avoidance behaviors, everybody and lobsters.”

“I still like lobster,” Rick said.

“Get over it,” Myka advised him. To Helena, she said, “FYI, the meal _is_ lobster-free. You can’t possibly have thought I’d try to put anything like that over on you.”

And Helena said, “This is one of the reasons why I love you.” Selling it. But it _was_.

“Wait,” Varsha said. “I thought you were the one who in actuality didn’t. Or might, but people aren’t sure?”

And the atmosphere changed yet again, this time definitively, as Rick pursed his lips. Sucked in a breath. Myka’s face turned a color closely related to that sported by lobsters. They looked at each other, then at Varsha. No one looked at Helena.

“Wait,” Varsha said again, “have I got it backwards? Are you”—she pointed at Helena—“the one who knows?”

All eyes turned to Helena, who said, “The one who knows what?”

“The one who knows that he”—now Varsha pointed at Rick—“knows that you ladies are not in fact engaged.”

“No, no,” Rick said quickly. “Myka knows that I know. Well, they both know that I know. But neither one knows that the other one knows that I know. Until, uh, right now.”

Helena opened her mouth to ask, “Myka knows that you know?” But she was preempted by Myka’s exclamation to Rick: “Hey! You were supposed to be helping!”

“I thought _I_ was supposed to be helping,” Helena said.

Rick said, “I’m helping to keep you _believing_ that you’re helping.”

“I’m not in fact helping?”

“Not with what you thought you were,” Rick said.

“I’m here under _false_ false pretenses?”

He nodded. “Now you’re getting it.”

“Why am I here under false false pretenses?”

“Then again maybe you’re not getting it at all. Over to you, Myka.”

“‘Over to you, Myka’?” Myka demanded. “You just blew the whole thing, and the best you’ve got is ‘over to you’?”

“Sorry, but I believe **_I_** blew the whole thing,” Varsha said. She did not sound at all apologetic.

Nevertheless, Rick sprang to her defense. “You’re not taking any blame, and neither am I! _She—_“ he said, pointing at Myka, “is the one who set all this up!”

But what was “all this”? It seemed, in this moment, to comprise Myka still red as a nightmarish crustacean, Rick still jabbing an accusatory finger in her direction, Varsha leaning back with arms crossed, apparently pleased with herself while at the same time happily uninvolved in what had just been revealed to Helena as… what _was_ “all this”?

TBC

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> original part 7 tumblr tags: I don't know if this will work, but I set particular goals for myself in this story, or maybe I mean hoops through which I intended to make it jump, and I'm trying to stick to the blueprint, this is one of those hoops, the switch on the switch, in related news, there is a movie called Paris When it Sizzles, starring William Holden and Audrey Hepburn, and I recommend it, as a screenwriting tutorial if nothing else, (no sugarcoat: it has many of the problems of its era), but anyway, once you've heard 'the switch on the switch!', said by Audrey Hepburn, your life will be a tiny bit better than it was before


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Where were we? Right, Helena just found out that Myka knows that Rick knows. But how does Myka know that Rick knows? And what exactly has Myka done with this knowledge? Why the false false pretense by which she’s dragged poor Helena back into the situation? Well, it’s really not that complicated (other than having to keep track both of who knows what, and of how many times you can use the word “know,” even farcically, before it starts to look all skewwhiff), because when you boil it down, most people’s motivations are pretty simple. We’re thinky animals, which certainly gets us into trouble, but still animals. Which also gets us into trouble. Certainly this Myka and this Helena are finding (and putting!) themselves in all that and more…

“Set all this up,” Helena echoed. “I don’t understand.” If Myka knew that Rick knew that she and Myka were not together, then why would Rick’s wanting Myka to meet his new girlfriend have anything to do with Helena? But wait, did Rick even… “_All_ this? Is Varsha really your girlfriend?” she asked him.

Rick blinked, very clearly caught by surprise. He looked from Varsha to Myka, then back again, following an imaginary _who did what_ tennis match, and Varsha still had her arms crossed, and she still wore a face of amusement, but did she look a bit less uninvolved? Finally, Rick said to Helena, “That’s a question I hadn’t thought about. And I’m not sure I want to, but the answer is, I hope so? Although I don’t know how long a con this is. Maybe Myka did talk her into pretending to be into me so she’d have the false false pretense for this dinner.”

Helena said, “I think that would, from my perspective at this point, make it a false false false pretense.” The words were absurd. The entire situation, whatever it might be, was several preposterous levels above, or perhaps below, that.

“From _my_ perspective at this point—a confused guy with a headache—I think we should just go with it.”

“You do? Our fates in Myka’s hands? Does that seem at all wise?” She felt herself turning stern, warding off incredulous laughter.

Myka uttered a wounded, dramatic “Hey!”

Rick, unmoved by Myka’s tone, said to Helena, “I guess she’s doing okay so far. For me, anyway; I don’t know how you feel about the long con.”

“This is not a long con!” Myka protested.

Rick, still unmoved, said, “I’m just saying if it is, it might be fine by me. Might end up being fine by Helena too.”

“That is going to depend heavily on the purpose for which I’m being conned.” Helena told this to Rick, not to Myka.

“Again, not a con,” Myka said. “Not,” she repeated, and “not,” she said again, as if she were tapping Helena on the shoulder: look at me, not at him; talk to me, not to him.

Did she really want Helena’s attention? All right then… Helena turned to her and said, “That’s disingenuous of you.” Myka’s shoulders sagged, and she blinked an aggrieved blink. “Don’t look at me like that,” Helena told her. “If I’m here under false false pretenses, it’s some sort of con. And given that the original pretense was that we would continue to deceive Rick, it’s at least two layers of falsehood, if we’re only pretending to deceive him.” Of course she herself had been only pretending to deceive him. By pretending to pretend. Her head was beginning to hurt… she blamed Rick. For having brought up headaches.

Myka said, “When you put it that way, I sound terrible.”

_Not as terrible as I sound_, Helena thought.

“You _are_ terrible,” Rick said to Myka, but he might as well have directed it at Helena too.

Myka said a mild, “Do not even try.”

“Fair,” he allowed.

And then absolutely nothing happened. No one said anything. They all breathed, and presumably blood continued to circulate, but voluntary movements were in short supply. Helena asked herself if she should storm out… but she answered herself, _Not without knowing the full story_. And yet she didn’t want to ask Myka to explain that full story, because what would her explanation be?

Varsha didn’t share Helena’s reluctance. She broke the silence with, “Let’s say, for argument, that I’m an innocent bystander, one who was not informed of the _entire_ story.” She looked hard at Rick, and Helena began again to believe that she was innocent.

“I tried,” he said. “You’ve got to give me that. But Myka was the one explaining the whole thing to _me_, so you can see how maybe some nuance, or I mean logic, might not have made it all the way through the process.”

“Hey,” Myka protested again. “Plus, Varsha, you’re not a bystander, or at least not an innocent one. I’m pretty sure you said out loud that you blew the whole thing. _My_ whole thing. _You_ blew it.”

“But who put me in a position to blow your whole thing, whatever the actual content of that ‘whole thing’ may be? Whose fault is _that_?”

“Okay, that’s my fault,” Rick said.

“No,” Helena said, “ultimately, I suppose it’s mine.”

Myka held up her wineglass. “Fault? H. pylori. Bank on it.”

Varsha nodded, raised her glass, clinked it against Myka’s. “Not unreasonable. Consider Toxoplasma gondii.”

Myka exclaimed, “I would love to!” with get-me-out-of-this avidity, and Rick looked at Helena and rolled his eyes. She wanted to ask him, “Are we friends now?” Because she no longer cared about any sort of taking to task—just the truth, and between Rick and Myka, Rick was, oddly enough, the one who had more often told Helena the truth. He’d done it to torment her, yes, but it had always been the truth.

Varsha said, “Toxoplasma gondii. If we’re going to speak of fault and intentionality in terms of the propagation of an adaptation that promotes survival, and I think we can, or rather should, then—”

Rick interrupted, “Short version: it reproduces in cat guts, so it infects mice and makes them not afraid of cats, so the cats eat them. Life cycle, boom.”

“I don’t think ‘boom’ is adequately descriptive,” Varsha complained. “It’s a lovely little parasite, with cellular stages that—”

Rick interrupted again, with “I think we should go. Weird evening, Myka.”

Myka knocked her now-empty wineglass against his blond head. “Thanks for trying. I owe you one.”

“Nah, I’m pretty sure I’m still in your debt. Maybe literally.”

“Well, I don’t have cancer.”

“Valid point. Also, really good. I mean, not as a point; it’s just _good_. That you don’t have it.” Helena had known from the start, she truly had, that he didn’t wish Myka harm. But he said “good” with real fervor. She didn’t know him, not really, and she didn’t know _them_—him and Myka—beyond the bizarre circumstances under which they had all interacted. But she appreciated Rick’s fervor all the same. Her sentimentality on the point surprised her, particularly now… but she supposed she felt it because she did still believe him to be telling the truth. 

Myka was saying, “Thanks for that too. Varsha, don’t break up with him over this.”

“No, no,” Varsha assured her, “I’m using him to help my career.”

Myka looked a _What? _at Rick.

And Rick offered her the most open, genuine grin Helena had ever seen his face produce: an unselfconscious lifting of cheek muscles that thinned his eyes rather than his lips. He even showed his teeth. “That’s actually fine by me too,” he said, and that did not seem to be a lie either.

As they left, before Myka closed the door behind them, Rick offered Varsha his hand to hold, and she took it. Her smile as she did so was not as wide as Rick’s, but it seemed real, and Helena again envied them their unencumbered—and, indeed, most likely real—couplehood.

She envied them also their easy escape from the situation, the contours of which she feared to discover, for once they were gone, Myka turned to Helena and said, “Okay. Do your worst.” She leaned back against the wall, seeming to need that sure surface. The foyer’s magic had shifted, weakened: now all it could do was hold Myka upright.

“I know what’s happening,” Helena said, although she didn’t “know,” not as such. But she had been visited by a horrified thought: that Myka had lied to all of them tonight. That perhaps the falsity of the pretenses had a purpose that was even more—

“That’s kind of a relief,” Myka said. “That you know.”

“You’re trying to entrap me for some reason,” said Helena, hoping even as she said it that that was not in fact what Myka was relieved to know that she knew. “You have been, starting with your mother. To exact revenge for your colleague’s being fired at my behest?”

Now Myka drew her brows together. “Why would I want revenge for that? That’s months and months ago.”

“As mentioned, I don’t know how long a con this is. And it did make more work for you.” Myka had been so very overburdened, and so very annoyed with Helena, at the start. Helena was thinking it out now, beyond her first jolt of alarm at the idea that Myka might want some sort of retribution, and it seemed to make more and more sense, despite the expression on Myka’s face, which suggested that “sense” was not really what she thought Helena was making.

Myka said, “Wouldn’t that make Abigail more inclined to entrap you at this point? Besides, everybody hated him, so overall you did us a huge favor. I should be trying to thank you for getting him fired.”

“Is that what you’re doing?” Helena asked, and Myka shook her head. “Then I don’t understand.”

Myka shook her head again, this time clearly for effect, and sighed. “Then you’re incredibly dense.”

“_I’m_ incredibly dense,” Helena said, and now Myka nodded. “For not immediately grasping the point of your byzantine maneuverings?” Myka nodded again, and now Helena sighed. “I see that it was not any one _day_ that could become more bizarre.”

That got her a confused “what?”

“Never mind. Is your mother in on it as well?”

“Well. She _wasn’t_.”

“But she is now?”

“She is. Do you want to know why?”

Helena crossed her arms. “At this point, I have no idea what I do and/or do not want to know.”

“Poor baby,” Myka said, but Helena wasn’t ready to return to feeling sentimental about that. Myka waited a moment, then shrugged. “After you left, that night after the dinner, she was really pleased, and I thought ‘well, this went exactly as intended.’ But then she told me why she was pleased.”

“Does this ‘why’ reflect poorly on me?”

“No. Well, I don’t think so, but it depends on how you feel about certain things.”

“What certain things?”

Myka took a breath, blew it out. She looked up at the ceiling, back down at Helena. Then she flapped her hands, as if tossing away whatever was causing her to delay. “She said to me, ‘You’re in love.’”

“So it _did_ go exactly as intended.”

“No… because I told her yes.”

“You. Are. Not. Making. Sense.” Helena wanted to punctuate her words not with pauses, but with repeated shakes of Myka’s shoulders. Yet that would have meant touching Myka, and _that_ was—

“I was telling the truth,” Myka said.

“You… what?”

“You see what I’m saying.”

“Almost never. But this time, I… believe I do.” Terrifying, to say those words.

“So then I told her everything.”

“How did she take it?” Helena had found it difficult—still found it difficult—to dislike Myka’s mother. The reverse, however, was not necessarily true.

But Myka smiled. It was the indulgent smile. “She likes you.”

“Despite my willingness to help you deceive her?”

“You were helping me. That’s the part she liked. The parts. You keep doing that.”

“Helping you?”

“You never have to, but you do it anyway. You don’t seem like the kind of person who does a lot of things anyway that she doesn’t have to do.”

Speaking of helping, and occasions on which she had done so… “Did you ingest H. pylori intentionally?” Helena demanded. Certainly the idea was now in her head because of Varsha’s insistence on the point, but it seemed not implausible, given the entire… whatever it was. Regardless of what it might come to mean that the whatever it was had now taken this turn… wherever it had.

“That’s ridiculous,” Myka said.

“_That’s_ ridiculous? All of this, but _that_ is the bridge too far?”

“I’m not saying it’s ridiculous because it’s a bridge too far; it’s ridiculous because I hadn’t even really met you yet. How was I supposed to know I’d _want_ to spend time in the hospital with you? So you could reasonably ask me that only if I end up _back_ in the hospital. Then again it might give me nothing but ulcers if I did ingest it intentionally this time, and then where would we be?”

_Where would we be?_ was an excellent question. An even better one, Helena reckoned, was _Where are we now?_ She didn’t ask, or attempt to answer, either of them. Instead, she said, “Your strangeness is of a depth I fear to plumb.”

“I didn’t make lobster tonight either. I really want to emphasize that.”

Helena thought she might fracture down the middle as she stood still—not leaning against a wall, but she had begun to back away from Myka, and now she stopped—and wanted two things very much at once: to kiss Myka senseless and to break something across her non-hardhatted head. Instead of doing either, she said, “Let’s stick to logistics for the moment. At what point did Rick tell you that he knew? It had to be after the dinner with your mother.”

“What? No, he didn’t know, not until I told him.”

“But he did. He’s known since the hospital. He spoke to the paramedic who brought you in, and then he confronted me about it.”

“Wait, what?” Myka’s confusion appeared genuine. “Why didn’t he tell me he knew?”

“Because I asked him—no, told him—not to,” Helena said.

Myka furrowed her brow. “Why? And why didn’t _you_ tell me that he knew?”

“Because you told me not to tell him the truth. I assumed that if you wanted him to believe that we were engaged, you wouldn’t want to know that he knew that we were _not_ engaged, regardless of whether that came from him or from me.”

“You’re starting to sound like you say I sound. As confusing, anyway.”

“You know what they say about couples,” Helena said, and she added, as a reminder both to herself and to Myka, “even fake ones, apparently.”

“This isn’t fake,” Myka said. “Whatever it is, it isn’t fake.” She wasn’t performing “wounded” as she said it, the way Helena might have expected. No, her words were earnest, and they brought everything to a stop. The moment stretched, lingered. Helena felt it, felt what might happen. She took a new step backward.

Myka watched her do it. Then she said, “But I’ll tell you what he did tell me, after I told him this thing that, according to you, he already knew. This thing that he knew, that you knew that he knew, that I didn’t know that he knew.”

“I’m not sure I want to know.”

“I wasn’t sure I wanted to either. He said that it made sense of something that hadn’t before, something he’d overheard you and Steve talking about, in the hospital.”

So much for friendship. “He seems to have a great deal of spare time when he’s at work. Time to chat with paramedics about how long you and I have known each other… time to lurk and listen to other people’s private conversations.”

“I’d say ‘poor baby’ again, but you didn’t like it so much the last time,” Myka said, and Helena tried hard not to respond. “Anyway, he said that you said that you were staying with me so I’d be more likely to recommend you for the project. Was it true?”

“He’s telling the truth. I did say that.”

“That’s not what I’m asking,” Myka said, still serious, sincere.

The sincerity spooked Helena into backing away again, this time rhetorically. “_That’s_ why you’re entrapping me now, isn’t it. That’s what you want revenge for, now that you’ve found it out. I can’t blame you at all.”

And _that_ got her the indulgent smile again. Helena welcomed it and didn’t. Something like fight-or-flight adrenaline tanged in her throat, and she swallowed it back down, only to taste it again when Myka said, with a hint of challenge, “See, but that left one thing unexplained. No, two things.”

Helena was moved to snort. “Just two?”

“Three, now that I’m counting.”

“I can’t wait for the final tally.”

“If all you cared about was the bid, why did you agree to come to dinner with my mother? I couldn’t help you at that point, and it could have hurt you, if anyone found out. So that’s one unexplained thing.” She pushed herself away from the wall and took a long-legged step in Helena’s direction.

“I have no explanation.” _No good one, at any rate_, she added in her head. _None that involves anything other than pathetic, selfish want clad in only the thinnest of solicitude veneers_.

“And two—it’s basically the same as the first thing—why did you come tonight?” A second step, this one covering even more distance.

“Same answer. What is the third thing?”

“Why did Rick agree to help me tonight? If he knew all along, and if he thought your intentions were so terrible.” Third step.

“You can’t possibly think that I have any insight into his motivation.”

“I’m going to go with, because you did come to dinner with my mother. And because you let it slide right off your back—well, mostly—when he tried to needle you, to make you blow _that_ whole thing. Which I now realize is what he was doing. In his wall-colored wallpaper way, he was trying to protect me. Same with his last-ditch ‘here’s what I overheard’ disclosure.”

“Bit late in the game for that—to protect you, that is. Given how awry your engagement went.” Helena winced as soon as she said this, regretting it. Tactless, to bring that into the conversation.

It did make Myka stop moving. “I think he was trying to suss out how late in _this_ game it is. This you-and-me game.”

“How late. Is this a game? You’re making me think it might be, given that the plans for the falsity of your pretenses might have been drawn up by M.C. Escher.”

“Aren’t the false pretenses more of a matryoshka doll?” Myka offered those words with humor, matching Helena’s Escher hyperbole, but then her smile faded. “I wanted to see you. I wanted so much to see you.”

“Why didn’t you just tell me that?”

“You wouldn’t have come if I had. You were being ethical. And I wanted to stay… present. Top of mind.”

“Oh, you’ve succeeded at that.” Helena had meant to saturate that with sarcasm, but it came out as a bald fact.

“Because I was afraid you’d meet someone, and—”

“And contrive to spend nearly twenty-four hours in hospital with her?” And contrive to spend months entangled in those hours…

“Probably not on purpose, but—”

“What if _you_ had met someone?” Helena asked.

“I didn’t want to meet someone.”

Yes, entangled. The both of them. “Again, do you see how if you had simply _told me that_, it would have obviated the need for all of this foolishness?”

“And again, you wouldn’t have come if I had, so all it would have obviated was the foolishness itself. Not the _need_ for it.” The stretching yearn Myka put on _need_… “But I’m sorry.”

That “I’m sorry” was chastened. Sad. Helena didn’t want her sad. “Then again…” she said, “this foolishness. You’re quite creative.”

“I’m not actually sorry,” Myka said, and that sounded nearly as apologetic as her original “I’m sorry” had.

“Of course you’re not.”

“Because I did get to see you.”

“And you did stay top of mind.”

Myka resumed her walk toward Helena. Helena stepped back again. She felt herself running out of living-room real estate. “But why are we in this situation at all?” she tried, to get Myka to rethink—to rethink _rationally_—and to stop moving forward. Because the atmosphere was thickening: They were alone. Alone late at night. Alone late at night, and Myka had told Rick the truth—had made herself vulnerable—just so she could see Helena. Who was running out of living-room real estate. “I wrote you emails about books and that was enough?”

“I threw up in your office and that was enough?”

“That wasn’t all there was.”

“That’s my point.” Myka took another step.

Helena said, in desperation—the adrenaline was back, and she felt her voice shake—“People tend to hate me.”

Myka’s smile, this time, was one of indulgence crossed with disbelief, and Helena had to force herself to not to heed the way it tugged at her. Myka said, “Maybe it’s because you play a villain on TV. Or you think you do. And who are all these people who hate you, anyway? I’ve only ever met people who like you. Even Rick. He told me so.”

“He did not.” Indignant: that was safe territory.

“It was grudging,” Myka conceded.

“Varsha’s grandmother, certainly,” Helena said. Now haughty: also safe.

“That’s only because she hasn’t met you yet. Besides, you can do an American accent when you do meet her, and everything’ll be fine.”

“First, no I can’t.”

“You can’t do an American accent?

Helena demonstrated, saying, “I can’t do an American accent,” utilizing her usual version of that accent. She had a sudden hope that perhaps she had got better over time, that the ability to Americanize had sneaked its way—

Myka said, straightfaced, “You are wildly correct. Please don’t ever do that again. Varsha’s grandmother would hate you just because that’s so bad.”

Now Helena felt a bit wounded, but she pressed on, “And second, even if I could, if I did, then Varsha wouldn’t be able to tell us apart.”

“No, it’s that she wouldn’t _bother_ to. But why would it matter?”

“You don’t expect her to… be around?” And Helena was visited again, briefly, by the idea that Varsha might have been a part of the trickery, regardless of how genuine Varsha had seemed to be, at any given point, and regardless of what Myka had said, at all of the given points.

“I have no idea if she’ll be around. That’s between her and the wall-colored wallpaper. My point is, I don’t expect it would _matter_. Who cares if Varsha mixes us up? I’ll answer to your name if she yells it at me. Wouldn’t you answer to mine?”

Helena ignored that. “But even if I keep my mouth closed entirely, Grandma Parekh will come to realize that she hates me, because as I was saying, people tend to hate me. And I suspect that people tend to love you.”

“People tend to want to protect me.”

“Thus placing me in the vast run of cases. What if I… helped you, yes, by being present at a time when you needed someone present, and all you are is…”

“Grateful?” Myka asked, and Helena nodded. “I am grateful. But do you really think gratitude alone would have pushed me through all this?” She took yet another step.

Helena said, “I don’t know what motivates you. I could not begin to guess what motivates you.” She was backing up verbally now, because it would be ridiculous to literally back into the wall, and she did not want to repeat out loud Myka’s motivation, the motivation that Myka had said that she had told her mother was true. Everything would be better if what Myka had said that she had told her mother was true was not in fact true, because it was _useless_ for it to be true. “In love” was a useless phrase in any case, or rather so variously defined as to be functionally useless… who could say what it signified for Myka, and whether her definition and Helena’s would line up in any meaningful way?

“Don’t lump me in with Rick. Don’t. Because you do know, because I told you. Because the fact is, there’s only so long you can be engaged to somebody before you can’t stand it anymore.”

“Some people,” Helena said, and she did try to take another step back, but there was the wall, and her foot and then the rest of her struck it with a series of clumsy thumps, “manage years-long engagements.”

Myka ignored Helena’s encounter with the wall. “Are you one of those people?” she asked.

“Long-distance, even.”

Myka reversed course now, moving across the room, away from Helena, back into the foyer. They were as far apart as they could possibly be in the space. “Can you stand it?”

“Continents,” Helena said. “Oceans.”

“Now you’re just saying words. Stop it.”

“There are so many reasons why I should not stop saying words.”

“I guess I can do all kinds of things while you keep saying words. Go ahead, keep talking. In fact, _please_ keep talking, because as long as you’re not doing that terrible accent?” Myka paused. Her pitch dropped. “The way you say words makes me lose my mind.”

The deepening of her voice… Helena was fast losing the ability to keep hold of her own mind, but she managed, barely, to articulate, “I don’t know what to say. Other than _don’t_. I promised Abigail. I promised her that what happened to your colleague—the one with the unfortunate PTA encounter—would not happen to you. That I would not allow it to happen.”

“I appreciate that you want to protect me. But my decisions are mine. And yours are yours. I’m not forcing you to do anything. Right now, I’m trying to be up front about what I want, and that’s you.” Myka said this plain and pure, and Helena wanted to beg her not to say such things, and certainly not like that. “You don’t have to want me,” Myka now said. “I wish you would, and I think you do, but you don’t have to. You can want to protect me and that’s all, or help me, and that’s okay.”

“I don’t think it is ‘okay’ if that’s all, not in any way ‘okay,’ because… well, but I do want to protect you. And, not incidentally, a host of other people. So anything else I want… _everything_ else I want—” She was going to break. She was going to be weak and break, and that was going to be a disaster, and she could see the train bearing down on them, tied to the track as they both in this moment seemed to be.

Helena’s face must have spoken of looming catastrophe, for Myka softened. Expression, posture, and then tone: “You’re trying so hard.” She didn’t need to say “poor baby”; Helena could feel it. “Okay. I’ll try too.”

Helena escaped the far wall and went to stand in the foyer with Myka. She might have been testing Myka or daring her, but regardless, nothing happened. Myka had meant what she said. “I’m so sorry,” Helena told her.

“Me too. For real this time. I shouldn’t have done this to you. Is it terrible if I say I wish it had worked?”

“It did work. Just not… I mean…” And so “the logical conclusion” was added to “Myka’s motivation” as defined quantities that Helena could not bring herself to speak aloud.

“Then I wish it _hadn’t_ worked.”

“Do you mean that?”

“No.” An aggravated exhale. “Of course not. Because I got to see you. But yes, because seeing you… it reminds me that I want to. See you, I mean. Well. See you, and.” She closed her mouth. Because she couldn’t bring herself to articulate the logical conclusion either?

She was the most precious thing Helena had ever seen, or heard, or imagined could exist. Surely that meant Helena was embodying some recognizably functional definition of “in love.” She wanted to say that to Myka. She wanted to kiss that to Myka. She wanted to _prove_ that to Myka. Instead of all of it, instead of any of it, she said, “Goodnight.” The taste was terrible, far worse than adrenaline. “I mean, it has been, up to now. Good, that is. Strangely so. But it won’t be, strangely or otherwise, once I leave. For me.”

“Even fake ones, I heard,” Myka said.

“You were right.”

“Maybe. Doesn’t help.”

If this were real, they would have been only playing, pretending that Helena was about to leave, and now they would be falling into each other. But it was not real. It might not have been fake, but it was not real. _Just one more kiss_, Helena’s body urged, but she heeded reality: she turned to go. She stepped into the hallway. She expected the door to click closed behind her, either softly or decisively, and for that sound to end it all.

Instead, she heard Myka yelp, “Wait!”

TBC

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> everybody is tied to the railroad tracks of looooove, anyway I've been thinking a lot about the problem I have Helena think about with regard to the phrase 'in love', i.e. the way in which certain words or phrases mean such wildly different things to different people or groups or what have you, we think we're saying words, and that we're communicating very particular meanings via those words, but..., that's why we need mediators like money, because value is different from meaning, (sometimes)


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Over on Tumblr, @lonely-night remarked that it would be great if each part of this story could be introduced by JM saying "Previously, on Helicobacter..." And then clips would follow: for this part we’d see a bit of the Helena/Steve/Abigail scene at the neighborhood site, as well as some of Helena’s conversation with Charles. We’d revisit the revelation that Myka knew that Rick knew, if only for everybody’s shocked facial expressions, then replay the reason Myka gave Helena for the foolishness: “I wanted to see you.” Helena would back her way into the wall again (just because it pleases me to imagine watching that happen many, many times). She and Myka would agree, with great reluctance, to be good, and Helena would leave. And then Myka would call out that “Wait!”…

In response to Myka’s “Wait!”, Helena turned around, uttering a pathetically eager, “What is it?” Maybe Myka had decided not to try after all, and maybe that would give Helena the necessary excuse to—

“I forgot to give you your book. Stay here a minute.” She dashed from the foyer.

Helena didn’t want to stay there, not even for a minute; she wanted to run after Myka. Down that hall. It had to lead to the bedroom…. but she was trying, and she had no excuse. She stayed in place.

Myka returned with the book: a paperback, face down as Helena supposed was now their custom, plain white on its back, with black text, vaguely academic in font. Helena turned it over… well. Very nearly as bad as a lobster—not the graphic, a lovely reproduction of a landscape-painted silk scroll, but the title: _Opening a Mountain: Kōans of the Zen Masters_.

Helena felt that fracture-down-the-middle sensation again… yet she resisted the urge to launch herself at Myka. She resisted also the urge to launch the fine academic paperback, with its landscape-painted-silk-scroll cover, at Myka’s head. She said, “You cannot be serious. How many books do you have back there, that you happened to have this one at the ready?”

“You should come see for yourself,” Myka said, and Helena was ready to agree, _Yes I should_, and continue on to, _Yes I will_—but Myka held up her hands in a gesture that combined I-give-up and stop-right-there. “I mean, that’s what I _could_ say, but I won’t, because I told you I’d try.”

Helena accused, “You just did say it.”

“That’s true. But not… you know. Not like I would, if I weren’t. Trying.”

“Which you are.”

“Which I am. So I’ll come clean: Abigail told me about the koan-ing. First there is a fountain? And then when I was trying to figure out something for you for tonight, I thought, okay, it has to be a book about koans and also a fountain, but there aren’t any, as far as I can tell, but then I realized that if she was subbing a fountain in for a mountain, I could too. _Should_ too. So this is really _Opening a Fountain_.”

“A ceremony that the city will not be performing,” Helena noted.

Myka nodded. “Because the fountain won’t exist. And by the way you still haven’t told me whether _you_ had that not-fountain book sitting around.”

“Books that are about fountains that are not. In how many different ways can a fountain fail to exist?”

“See, maybe you’re getting the hang of this koan thing. So you might like the book after all. Or at the very least it could give you ammunition to use against Abigail and Steve if they gang up on you again.”

“Ammunition? What a violent idea, in a Zen context. Steve would be appalled.”

“I don’t know; some of those Zen masters get pretty brutal with their poor disciples. Whacking people with sticks, cutting off fingers and arms… I confess I had no idea.”

“Did you read the entire thing?”

“I’m kind of constitutionally incapable of not. I used to read almost everything we got in at the bookstore.” She chuckled, a sound that suggested some private joke. “Anyway, do you want to hear my favorite?”

“Koan? No.”

“Oh.”

Such disappointment in that small breathed syllable. Helena wanted to melt into her. Say no more words. That had to be Buddhist in some fashion, did it not? E.g., what is the sound of two people in love not talking… well, but that wasn’t at all paradoxical, was it; instead, it was all too easily imaginable, and Helena felt her face heat. To distract from her blush, she said, “But I would like to continue hearing you say words. For this littlest of whiles. So do what you must.”

Myka took the book back from Helena. She flipped through it, settling near the end. “Okay, here goes. ‘A Woman’s True Soul.’ Here’s the main case: ‘Fifth patriarch Hung-ren asked a monk, “Ch’ien’s soul was divided into two parts. Which one was the true soul?”’” She raised an expectant gaze to Helena.

“Clearly I am not in fact getting the hang of this koan thing.”

“You will when I read you the prose commentary,” Myka said. “It’s what really sold me: ‘If you understand the true meaning of this case, you will know that coming out of a shell and going back in a shell is like a traveler lodging at an inn. If you do not understand it, don’t rush about blindly. When earth, water, fire, and wind disintegrate all at once, you will be like a lobster fallen into a pot of boiling water, frantically thrashing about with its arms and legs. At that time, don’t say I didn’t warn you.’” Myka looked up from the book. “Do you need the verse commentary too?”

“No thank you; I feel sufficiently enlightened. Which is to say, not at all enlightened.” She did wonder, briefly, whether the verse might be about a lobster as well. With a divided soul? Fractured down the middle… “Is there also one that deals with never-children?”

Myka handed the book back to her. “You’ll have to read it to find out.”

“My reading list is lengthy. Thanks to you.”

“I did grow up in a bookstore,” Myka said, in not-quite-apology.

“Thus perfusing books into your very being. How on earth did you make your way to city planning?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“Of course I do.”

“You may change your mind about that.” Myka laughed that same peculiar private-joke laugh from the moment before. “I’ve told this story a few times, but not lately. It used to end a little differently than it will today. But okay, let’s do this: how did I end up in city planning? I read a book about it.”

“Jacobs? Mumford?”

“You’d think. But no: a textbook. Dad would sometimes pick up a few cheap lots of buybacks from universities, because you never know what’ll turn up. I was usually the one who’d go through them to see what we got, keep what was pristine, kick out anything with too many margin notes.” She paused, as if it were Helena’s turn to say something—something of significance.

“That seems sensible,” was all Helena could think of.

“It was, for the store. But I was drawn to the ones with notes, especially if they went beyond the usual—you know, question marks, or ‘yes’ or ‘what’ or ‘important.’ I guess I was looking for… engagement.” That laugh again. “So anyway, this planning textbook was so covered in commentary, the margins pretty much didn’t even _exist_.” Another laugh. “Elaborate arguments, lots of first-person narration. A novel of ideas, hiding right there in that textbook. I read the whole thing—both of them, textbook and novel—in three days… really an amazing experience. Moving, even.”

“Who would write such notes?” Helena scoffed, and that jeer was directed at her young self. She had been preoccupied with her own thoughts in just that way, and she’d littered margins with those thoughts, which had seemed so very profound. So very worth recording. In retrospect it was nothing but a silly, affected habit.

“Funny you should ask,” Myka said.

“Is it?”

“Funny _you_ should.” Myka blinked, twice, cartoonish eye-bats, clearly intended to carry meaning.

Meaning. Meaning? “Wait.”

Myka reached over and tapped the book that Helena held. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“No,” Helena stated. “No. No. No, no, no, no, no, no, no.”

“If you say so.” Myka’s smile said otherwise.

“No,” Helena said again. She held the book of koans up, something physical, solid, to ward off the… truth? But it _could not_ be so. “No, and also no.”

“Your argument isn’t all that persuasive.”

“So it _is_ all my fault.”

“As it turns out.”

“You cannot be serious.”

“You said that before, but I can be serious. You’ve stood right there—literally, right there—and watched me be serious. More than once.”

“No. No. It’s H. pylori’s fault. You said to bank on it!”

“H. pylori, with an assist from H. Wells. H.G. Wells, in fact, according to how you signed your name in the book.”

Helena had liked to sign her name that way when she was young, had in fact billed herself that way in as many circumstances as she could get away with. It both hid her gender and made her a curiosity, and for some time, she’d wanted that. But eventually she’d tired of that sort of deception, regardless of what it gained her; she was herself, and claiming otherwise, even implicitly, seemed juvenile. As did arguing in earnest with the author of a city planning textbook. “Perhaps it was some other H.G. Wells. Perhaps it was the original.”

That made Myka smile. “In a book first published in 1997? It was what you said about leaving something out, leaving space for the future, that got to knocking at me as something I’d heard or read… something not-new. So I put it in the back of my mind, let it cook, and eventually it clicked. Later than it should have, really—not that long ago. I had to call my mom and get her to dig the book out of a box at home to make sure. Will you be pleased or bothered to know that you still sound like yourself?”

“My undergraduate self? Bothered.”

“Don’t be mean to that girl,” Myka told her. “I really liked her. I didn’t know she was a girl, of course, but I really liked her.”

That was inappropriately pleasing. Helena tried to brush it off with, “She was an undergraduate. She knew nothing about anything.”

“True. But in both our defenses, I didn’t know anything about anything either. I was trying to decide which way to go, and as it turned out, there you were.”

“So I caught you at a vulnerable moment.”

“It’s kind of your M.O.”

After a moment, Helena managed a slightly sour, “Touché.”

“Why’d you sell it, anyway?”

“The textbook?” Now Helena laughed. “Funny you should ask.”

“Is it?”

“Not quite as funny that _you_ should, but: I needed money to buy flowers.”

This occasioned a smile that might reasonably have been described as _goofy_. “For my mother?”

Helena was mightily tempted to smile the same way in return. “Not quite. For mine, because she was coming to this country for the first time, to visit me. She loves flowers, and I couldn’t bear to have her walk into my shabby apartment and see nothing that would make her happy, so I sold the textbook. Didn’t get much for it; it was too marked up. As you, bizarrely, saw.”

“I bet seeing you made her happy,” Myka said. “I bet the flowers weren’t even that important. Unless there were enough of them to hide a pie in?”

“No, but I’ve tried to make up for it in the years since. Bigger and better.”

“I still bet seeing you is enough. Even so, you should have been paid more for that book, if only because it helped me, in a very particular way. I spent—I _have_ spent—a lot of my life being indecisive. So if nothing else comes of this whole…” Myka was in her mental thesaurus again, and it was yet another absurdity that Helena should find this woman’s facial expression when searching for a word so very enthralling, rather like a story in itself, a story with genre conventions that were becoming familiar, for Myka gave up and said, “Thing. This whole thing. If nothing else, I’m glad I got to say thank you.”

“For what? Your job is stressful and demanding.”

“So’s yours.”

“But I’m not blaming you for leading me to it.”

“I’m not blaming you for anything. I’m telling you what happened, because you asked.”

Helena had to concede it: “I did ask.”

Myka nodded. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“What is it I am? A lobster thrashing in a pot of boiling water?”

“Sounds uncomfortable,” Myka said.

“Sounds nightmarish, but also correct.” Such an improbable circumstance. Such an extraordinary person to find in such an improbable circumstance. And now Helena had to leave the person and the circumstance… “You tried,” she wanted to assure her younger self. “You didn’t know you were trying, but you did try very hard.” Instead, she said to Myka, “I should go.”

“Also nightmarish, but also correct. If we’re still trying to be good.”

“Are you going out of your way to tempt me?”

“See, if I weren’t trying, I’d say ‘what if I am?’”

“I would love to be free to tease and flirt with you,” Helena said.

“I would love that too. Get out of here and take that book away from me, before I try to koan you into staying.”

Helena held the book closed in her hand with a firm grip, lest any koans escape. Myka would immediately recruit them, and they—Myka and the koans, with a cheering section of prose and verse commentaries—would be successful. She considered voicing that absurd thought; would it make Myka laugh? Probably… but she could not justify delaying this second “goodnight,” so that was what she voiced instead, to a subdued echo from Myka, and once again she expected to hear the door shut behind her.

Not a moment later, however, she realized that she had left a task undone, and that that was a completely decent justification for postponing the inevitable; she turned and pushed her hand against the not-quite-closed door with a “Wait!” of her own.

And now Myka was the one who sounded eager as she said, “What is it?” Not as pathetic as Helena had, but even so.

“I forgot to take a picture of you,” Helena said. She began searching her bag for her telephone.

Myka said a skeptical, yet still somewhat eager, “Why do you need to take a picture of me?”

“My brother wants one.”

“Your brother. Really?”

“Really.” She found the telephone, but she refrained from looking up as she said, “He wants to know what you look like.”

“Why?”

A reasonable question. “Because I might have… spoken to him about you.”

“You told your brother about me?”

Helena nodded. She took a photo, examined it. Myka’s brows were slightly drawn in, producing a tiny wrinkle between them, ghosting her face with confusion.

“Is that meaningful?” Myka asked as Helena regarded the picture. “I don’t know what kind of relationship you have with your brother. Because I didn’t know you _have_ a brother.”

“Now we’re even for my not knowing you grew up in a bookstore.” That made Myka smile, so Helena pointed and tapped again. “The relationship I have with my brother is _unhelpful_.”

“But… meaningfully so?”

“I _wanted_ his help.” This photo was objectively better: a lovely picture of a lovely, smiling woman. Yet this bookstore smile was not quite what Helena wanted.

“With?”

“Making a determination,” Helena said.

“Of?”

“A… state of affairs.”

“‘Unhelpful’ describes your entire family,” Myka declared, and Helena took a third photo as Myka went on, “Do I have to pan for every single word-nugget here?”

“Only if you want to extract them.”

“Do I?”

“Look,” Helena said, handing Myka her telephone, “here are three pictures of you. Do you think any one does you more justice than the others?”

Myka swept through the three, scrutinizing each, then handed the telephone back to Helena. “I think I’m more interested in what you think.”

“I think I would like this one to be the one he sees.” Helena pointed at the last one… because Myka smiled a very particular smile when she was frustrated with Helena. That smile seemed to belong to Helena and no one else, and she wanted Charles to know that such an expression—such a feeling—existed in the world. Regardless.

“And you’ll send this one to your brother and you’ll say…”

“I’ll say, Charles, this is Myka.”

“At least it’s true.” She smiled that same smile again. “If his name’s really Charles, that is.”

Helena couldn’t help herself; she said in response, directly to that smile, “I’ll also say, she is the person I told you I was in love with.”

“Is _that_ true?”

“I did tell him that.” Silly obfuscation…

“That’s not what I’m asking.”

“All that my answer to what you are asking will do is make this ridiculous, impossible situation worse,” Helena said. But she said, still compelled by the smile that belonged to her and no one else, “Of course it’s true.”

Myka didn’t respond immediately, other than to let her mouth relax from its frustration, and Helena thought she must have been thinking some version of what Helena was: that normal people would not have stood still at such a moment, looking at each other across an invisible yet impenetrable barrier made of _ethical guidelines_. Then Myka said, “I don’t think that made it worse. I like the idea of not being alone. In it.”

“Love,” Helena said. A noun, a verb; an endearment, a wish… but it didn’t matter. “We’re both going to be alone.”

“I know. I have to send you home now.”

Helena nodded.

“Goodnight,” Myka said, and now it was Helena’s turn to offer that sad echo, to turn away from a face that spoke, as she was sure her own did, of regret.

This time, as Helena waited for the sound of the door-close, she could think of no good reason to stop it from happening—and then it did happen: a slide, then a conclusive click.

But then there was another noise, a dull thump, something—a hand?—hitting that door. Then yet another sound: a metallic clop, or rather an unclop, for then Myka was calling, “Wait!”

Helena turned around, but she did it with a tired smile. “Are we going to do this all night?”

Myka’s face was no longer in any way forlorn. She said, “No… this.”

She reached for Helena and pulled her back inside, and if Helena had heard the door’s slide-click this time she would have thought it magic, for the drunk-club-shadow foyer had got its enchantment back: she opened her mouth under a demanding kiss, returning it without hesitation or shame or regret, as _I like this_ heated its way fast to _I want this_, with any consequences to be paid in another world, not this one, for in this one, there was only want and its at-last kiss of fulfillment, kindling still more want every minute it went on and on and on…

Not magic, but inevitable, or maybe inevitability was the real magic: Helena was completely sober, the light was on, and no spell compelled her—yet she did not, could not stop.

TBC

Note: I made up neither the koan nor the book from which it’s taken: see Steven Heine’s _Opening a Mountain: Kōans of the Zen Masters_, p. 184. Nobody thought I made up _The King’s Fountain_ either, right? I don’t invent stuff if I don’t have to, mostly because I’m lazy. Why waste a bunch of imaginative work when things (and history) exist?

Here’s the verse commentary, anyway:

Clouds and moon fuse into a single pale shade,  
Valleys and mountains, so distinct.  
Hundreds of thousands of blessings—  
Is this oneness or differentiation?

I find that not inapplicable to a lot of situations, ones in which many of us might be inclined to thrash about like a lobster in a pot of boiling water. My favorite part of the whole thing, though, is this: Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> original part 9 tumblr tags: if you're keeping score, the textbook was my next hoop, as you may know by now I get hung up on causes, and how events (seem to) conspire to maneuver us into the situations in which we find ourselves, and in spite of how many other ways the world might unfold, we have access to only the one way, and have to accommodate ourselves to that way, but the fact is you never know what you're setting in motion, and/or how it will come back to you, just be ready, and do some good while you wait


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This part's original incarnation made its debut the week after the big JK/JM DragonCon extravaganza. I wanted to memorialize that experience, as well as my own part in it, so what I said was, substantially, this: “I’m not going to put up a separate post about it, as my inclination at this point is to keep things pretty quiet. JK—and JM, but we all know her attitude toward social media is more laissez-faire—gave the okay for me to tweet that one photo of her and JM on the first day, so based on how it all played out, I’m going to say, for the time being and as a reminder to myself when I one day look back on this, that that and asking the Bering-and-Wells wedding question are my public contributions. (All hosannas to @lejunkdrawer for giving everyone access to the panels, particularly Sunday’s unprecedented experience. Although I suppose most of the experiences were unprecedented…) As I mentioned in tags of this very story, a lot of things happen in due time—specifically, I noted a quote of which I had lately been reminded, that ‘the universe’s delays are not the universe’s denials.’ As you might imagine, I’m more convinced than ever that that should be taken to heart: I’ve been lurking in this fandom since it began, and I’ve been posting my writing for it since 2013. I noted also, a while ago, again in tags on this very story, that the fact is you never know what you’re setting in motion. So we’ll see. As is the case here in Helicobacter: don’t say I didn’t warn you. Anyway, this is a short part; talky as ever. How they do go on. As do I.”

And if the kiss had lasted forever, they would have lived happily ever after. Easily ever after, never needing to face a consequence or make any active, possibly disastrous choice ever after. One continuous moment, perpetually right and good…

The kiss did not last forever. It ended, and that meant something had to happen _next_.

_Don’t think don’t think_—but then Helena thought. Her mouth still poised near Myka’s, she thought of mountains and fountains, what was and was not, what could be and could not.

“You’re thinking,” Myka said. She moved her head away, only a little movement of neck, but away.

“And what am I thinking?” Helena said, with some difficulty. _I could pull her back to me. Should I pull her back to me?_

“Every point is a decision point.”

“_That’s_ what you think I’m thinking?”

Myka said, “You might as well be. Because it’s true.” She offered a small shrug under Helena’s hands.

That made Helena think some more, and what she thought she said out loud: “I wouldn’t have believed it, not before you. Before this. I told you: impulses.”

Myka nodded. “Getting you into trouble. Although following an impulse is a decision. A snap one, but still.”

“Still ill-considered,” Helena said. Their mouths remained very close.

“I wouldn’t call all that thinking you’re doing right now particularly good _or_ healthy. Come with me.”

The hallway down which Myka had run before, down which Helena had wanted to follow: Myka pulled Helena down it now, not aggressive but insistent, taking little steps, not room-devouring strides, letting Helena keep her balance; considerate motions, sweet even, but what balance?

And then they were in a room—not the transitional hallway anymore, but a room. Its purpose right there in its name. “Your bedroom,” Helena said. Brainless stating of the obvious… or perhaps brain_ful_. Overthinking: unhealthy and poor.

“That’s what this is, yes,” Myka said. Also stating the obvious. Gently. She had only one hand on Helena now, her left palm warm as it rested on Helena’s right arm, just above her elbow.

The hand lay soft, with no intent, as if Myka thought that anything more would make Helena startle. And it might have done; she might have run out and away, now that she had yet another moment to think, which she hadn’t wanted to take, but the doorway had affected her. Going through it: wrong, right. She sought—literally, looked around to find—something about which to speak; she lit, somewhat incongruously, on the bedroom itself, because it was, itself, incongruous. “This room… it’s perfect. Photograph-ready.” Each piece of furniture was placed well, at precise, correct angles with every other; every opulent, expensive textile was folded or draped just so. Pillows were dented as if by a designer’s hand. Nightstands… the only things even vaguely out of place were the stack of books on one of the nightstands and the tortoise-shell-framed eyeglasses balanced atop that stack, yet even they might have been chosen by a photographer seeking to convey essential facts about Myka, so well did they signify the presence of intellect. “The rest of your apartment isn’t like this,” Helena said. This room breathed design intent, and while Myka’s other spaces weren’t unattractive, they were more haphazard, a “this piece was given to me by X” sensibility. Nothing in this expensive room had been obtained from any friend.

Myka looked around, as if through Helena’s eyes, and she nodded at the impression she received. “That’s true. I try to keep it up, because I had it redone—actually, done in the first place—right after the cancer.”

“Because…?”

The hand on Helena’s arm became a tease, a little push. “You want me to say ‘because I hoped you’d see it eventually,’ don’t you?”

“No.” But now that Myka had said that, Helena found herself hoping it _could_ be the reason. _What an egotist you are, and Myka knows it too._

“Doesn’t matter,” Myka said, and with a mind-read: “I’ll freely admit to finding your ego attractive. Attractive and justified, which just makes it more attractive.”

“Stop. You think highly of yourself as well. And it’s even more justified.”

“Now you stop.” One more push, and Myka gave a little eyeroll as well.

“If you didn’t have a sizable ego of your own, you wouldn’t have set any of your plans in motion. But you were certain you’d get away with all of them.”

“Not certain. Hopeful. So hopeful.” Her hand fell from Helena’s body, but a beseeching note in her voice called back to the abandon of those few moments earlier. Now a small but not inconsequential space separated their bodies—a space that left them far too close to continue having this conversation, but not close enough to not continue having it.

“But we were talking about your opulent bedroom,” Helena said, with what she hoped was only the smallest of hesitancies, “and why it is so. Not egos and whether mine prompted me to think that you hoped that I’d… see it. Which I now have. Rather, am. Am seeing it.” She didn’t mean to say it again, but she did: “Your bedroom.”

Myka said, “The real reason isn’t unrelated. I didn’t ever honestly believe I was going to die, but—reassessment. Things I’d always vaguely wanted.”

“Pushed, like problems, into the future?”

“Exactly.” Myka moved closer again. She raised that same hand to Helena’s face, stroked from her temple down to her chin. Helena leaned into the touch. “And you. I would have pushed you into the future, too—some alternate future.”

At that, Helena leaned away. “You should have.”

Myka stayed where she was, but she said, “If you don’t want this to happen, it won’t happen. If you really think it shouldn’t.”

“I told you I didn’t have explanations for you.”

“But you do?”

“But I don’t,” Helena said. “Other than: I have wanted this to happen, from the beginning. Which is not at all compatible with anything else.”

“You didn’t make any move. Was that all ethics?”

“_Any_ move?” That was too much, and untrue besides. “I kissed you completely inappropriately! And extremely thoroughly! In front of your mother!”

Myka laughed, but she said, “It could have been an act. Because I forced you into it.”

“Do you believe that? You can’t possibly believe it now. Did you believe it then?”

Myka was silent.

“You came to my house,” Helena said. “After your mother told you what she told you.”

“And I told her yes.” Retestifying.

“And you said you meant it. If you did mean it, you knew you hadn’t forced me into it. You knew it wasn’t an act.”

“All I knew was that it wasn’t on my part.” Myka paused. “I thought you’d see. I thought you’d _already_ seen. I mean, if my mother had.”

Helena smiled. “I’m fairly certain she knows you better than I do. I didn’t trust what I thought I saw—rather, couldn’t let myself trust what I hoped I saw. And it did begin as an act, didn’t it?”

“You keep forgetting that it’s H. pylori’s fault: it began as a medical emergency, one that you helped me through. Which I’m still betting you would have done anyway, never mind the act.”

Helena was not entirely certain that was true… but then she thought of the ambulance, of stricken Myka. What wouldn’t she have done, when faced with that vulnerability, all while telling herself—pretending—it was about the bid and nothing else? “But what if it _is_ only that I was there when you needed support. And we’re both still being… affected by that circumstance.”

“What if it is? What if we are? I think that’s how things like this start. You’re in a circumstance, and things happen that affect you. Would you rather we met some other way? Online? Or in a book club?”

“I would _so much rather_ we met online,” Helena grumbled. “Or in a book club.”

“Look at it the right way, and we sort of did, both of those. Emails about books,” Myka said, with an _I’ve got you there_ note in her voice.

“But that was because I researched you. Those Twitter accounts you follow.”

“But then you came up with interestingly booky things to say to me. Unless Steve or somebody else was Cyrano-ing for you?”

Helena tried for a moment to work out the ramifications of lying, saying yes. Would that fix anything? All the ramification roads seemed to lead to Myka discerning that she was lying, particularly since Myka was looking at her now with that “you’re so transparent” expression. “No one was Cyrano-ing,” Helena thus said, a little sullen at having been read.

“You do keep trying, don’t you? It’s sweet. Anyway, I told you, I looked you up too. You, your projects… I was interested in you, even at the beginning. I liked those emails. Even if I didn’t recognize that it was my old friend H.G. Wells sending them to me.”

Helena remembered Abigail using the word “moony.” She said, “I’m glad you did like them. For whatever reason you did.”

“What if they really were reminding me of undergraduate you? Maybe they weren’t, but what if they were?”

“Then I’ll try to be grateful for that. And yet I’m sorry at the same time, for it’s true that I was trying to influence you.”

“Well, so it worked. You influenced me to bring you all the way into my bedroom. It’s your own fault.”

“This and everything else.”

“And H. pylori!” Myka said with mock exasperation. “But I like eloquence. Whatever form it takes. Emails, margin notes…”

“So do I. Do you remember what you said, at the very first, about Wilson’s _Odyssey_?”

“Right now? No.”

They were stuck staring again.

“I wonder if it’s like smiling,” Helena said, to say something.

“Wilson’s _Odyssey_? That’s not what I said.”

Helena would have kissed her perplexed mouth, but she was not sure where they stood now. Other than in a bedroom, not quite in each other’s arms… wanting was one thing, but wanting and doing were not the same. She retreated to science: “The way in which the physical act of smiling—the performance of a smile—can elevate mood. That is, the causal arrow need not point in the direction one expects.”

“I’ve read that too. So you’re saying that in our case, performing this intimate relationship led us to the real thing? Or led us to want the real thing? Fake engagement was the smile, and here we are in an elevated mood of…?” Myka hooked a finger in the V of Helena’s shirt-neck, gave a little tug, then let her hand fall again.

Helena swallowed. “What do you think?”

“What do I think?” Myka stepped back, put a hand to her chin, and contemplated Helena, who found it both disconcerting and flattering to be so carefully regarded, preparatory to a verdict, and this was the verdict Myka gave: “I think you should smile more—and by the way I don’t mean that in the way that men tell women ‘you should smile more,’ and while I wish I didn’t have to tell you that’s not how I mean it, I do want to be clear: I think you should smile, but mostly around me, and mostly because your smile’s so beautiful. I mean _you’re_ beautiful, so I guess it was always going to be the case your smile would be too—then again, teeth. You never know. Anyway, you’re beautiful, and so is your smile, and I love to see it, and I love to see _you_, and I don’t care at all why I feel romantic about you, because the only thing that’s important to me right now is that I do, and you had better feel the same way, because otherwise I don’t know why we’re standing here in an overdecorated bedroom making awkward conversation about whether this is authentic Duchenne romance or some facsimile version where nobody’s eyes move.”

“You certainly know how to make the causal arrow point in the direction one expects,” Helena said, for who, in response to that mood-elevating monologue, could have refrained from smiling?

“See, there it is,” Myka said, with a smile of her own. “Beautiful.”

“Did my eyes move?” Helena asked, even as she knew they had, and were moving still, as her smile continued to grow.

“The corners of your eyes are crinkled like…” And then the thesaurus: the pause, the search, the surrender. “Like something really crinkly. You’ll be even more beautiful decades from now.”

Decades from now. Helena felt an unexpected anthropological wish to this minute see Myka’s own decades-from-now face, and, paradoxically, a wish to have watched it become that face. To be able to answer “decades” when anyone asked, “How long have you two…”

“I want _so much_ to kiss you,” Myka said, as if from inside that wish. “Kiss you and more, both of us, on purpose, knowing why.”

“Not pretending to fool anyone?”

“Not even each other. Not even ourselves.” She moved close again, her fingers back at the neckline of Helena’s shirt, playing there, whispering a touch. “We’re in a bedroom, and nobody knows we’re here. We can do anything.”

They could have, yet Helena stood still, savoring Myka’s light physical coaxing even as she wondered aloud, “Why am I letting you do all the pursuing?”

Myka’s smile in response to Helena’s wondering was, without question, authentic, her eye-corners crinkled like… something exceptionally crinkly. “I think you like it. Even beyond all the very good reasons for you to try to be good and resist, I think you like it. Sitting back, waiting till I prove to you that I can’t take it anymore and I have to see you or die. Speaking of ego.”

“I may have liked that,” Helena conceded, “and it may have had to do with…” She stopped speaking as the fingers on her neck stopped playing, to be replaced by Myka’s lips. “With… ego. But I meant this minute, now, here, when nobody knows. When we _can_ do anything. That isn’t my…” She found herself kissed on the mouth, still light, but it was a less subtle form of persuasion. “My M.O.,” she finished weakly.

“Maybe it is with me,” Myka told Helena’s collarbone.

Helena gave one last try at some sort of challenge: “I thought I wasn’t supposed to change.”

“I like that you remember I said that. And I’m in no way opposed to you working _very_ hard. But let me do a little work first, because I sort of get the feeling that you—”

One ecstatic jump-cut later, Myka’s leg was stilling between Helena’s and a new and wicked and sinful smile was curving Myka’s lips as she said, “I knew you’d be fast.”

“That was embarrassing,” Helena said, trying to avoid looking Myka in the eyes. Just like a body, to take it upon itself to tell the truth. To make everything so very clear.

Myka kissed her deep and long, then said, “Not if I’m fast too.”

She pushed Helena to the bed, pushed her down, pushed and pushed, then gasped, laughed, and said, “See?”

“You did that to make me feel better,” Helena said, up into the curve of a long neck.

“Trust me,” the neck-column vibrated back at her, “it had more than a little to do with how **_I_** feel. Besides, I told you, there’s only so long before you can’t stand it anymore. I was pretty sure that’s where I was. It’s more than gratifying that you were too.”

Both of them, on purpose, knowing why. Knowing why not, but also knowing exactly why.

TBC

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> original part 10 Tumblr tags: I won't lie:, I like being trusted, I also enjoy feeling that I can accomplish what I set out to do, but any accomplishment requires a lot of help, as the verse commentary on the koan I used in the previous part of this story put it:, 'hundreds of thousands of blessings', I recommend playing the long game, and doing the hard work, and being careful about what you put into the world, it'll come back to you, but only in due time


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One of my favorite passages in all of literature is _The Maltese Falcon_’s Flitcraft story. I’ve never dropped a story into another like that and let it sit, as Hammett so brilliantly does… there’s a little occasion of story-within-story(-within-story) here, but it ain’t no Flitcraft. This doesn’t matter at all; I just wanted to mention that I love Hammett’s writerly sangfroid. Nobody’s sang is notably froid in this silly, loquacious tale, particularly at this point in the narrative. See other points for blood in various other states. (P.S. Previously on Helicobacter, people were fast.)

“As rewarding as that was,” Myka went on, “I’d like to try it with a little more finesse now. And a little less wardrobe… if that’s all right with you.”

Helena couldn’t imagine a world in which that would not be all right with her. She nodded, and Myka began to move her hands slow but sure, as if she’d been waiting for just this assent from Helena, just this permission to relax into fully self-assured physical composure.

Helena’s body found this arousing but confusing. She said, “For some reason I thought you’d be shy.”

“Did you,” Myka said, shifting her weight onto one elbow, smiling down. “Is it the bookish thing?”

“No. Or, I don’t believe that’s it.”

“The Colorado thing? The city planner thing?”

“Are people from Colorado usually shy? Are city planners?”

Myka shrugged. “I don’t think so. I’m just trying out things that you know about me.”

“You like flowers,” Helena said. It was the only additional fact she could muster.

“I do… but that doesn’t seem to correlate either. Are you sure you’re not projecting? Because as we discussed a little while ago—a _very_ little while ago—I’m the one who’s done all the pursuing. So if anybody’s shy, I think it’s you.”

“Not all!” Helena protested. “I repeat: thorough, inappropriate kissing.”

“Please do repeat that. And didn’t I ask you what you’d do when my mother wasn’t watching? I really think you should be showing me.”

Helena pushed at Myka’s shoulders, her body, to turn them over. She looked down at Myka’s face… that face was smiling, happy, and Helena felt her blood turn to warm, extravagantly sugar-saturated syrup in response.

But in confronting, in believing in, that happiness, Helena saw that her idea that Myka _must_ be shy was indeed not unrelated to projection, for she herself was shy, physically shy, physically _shying from_ putting her hands on Myka—lest she do damage. The first goal, so many months ago, may have been to charm her, but the overriding _need_ had swiftly become to protect her, and Helena could feel that necessity heavying her hands now, creating this uncharacteristic physical reluctance. She should be not _in_ this bed, but rather by its side, keeping vigil: the thought was profoundly inappropriate for the present circumstance but so strong she could not stop her arms from tensing, preparing to lever herself out and away.

Myka must have felt her muscles move. “What’s wrong?” she asked, that tiny furrow deepening again between her brows. “Do you _need_ me to be shy? I can give it a try if you—”

“I see you in a hospital bed. Not this one,” Helena said, knowing those words wouldn’t make the furrow disappear, but needing to say them aloud all the same.

“I’m fine. You keep telling me I look well.”

“That makes it worse. How dare I do anything that might—”

“I’m fine.” She tried to pull Helena down, obviously to _show_ her how true that was.

But Helena stopped her: “No, no. Listen to me. You said that people tend to want to protect you. You understand that has to do with your looks, don’t you?”

A nod, coupled with a slight lip-curl, was Myka’s initial reaction. Then she untwisted her lip to say, “I know what I look like, and I know how people treat me.”

“So couple that with your body in real, physical distress, such that what I see when I look at you is—”

“I’m _fine_.” Impatient now.

Helena couldn’t blame her, but: “You _weren’t_,” she said, and she wished she could make this more clear to Myka while also making it, paradoxically, _less_ clear—less present—to herself.

“I wasn’t,” Myka conceded. “But now _you_ listen to _me_: undergraduate you.”

“What?”

“You don’t want me to hear undergraduate you in your voice now.”

“Oh,” Helena said aloud. And _Oh_, she said in her own head: _Oh, she is perceptive. Oh, she is clever. And oh, as perceptive and clever as she is, why can she not stop saying words that make this an ever larger problem?_

Helena expected Myka to immediately read her mind and comment on the size of the problem—if only to dismiss it—yet Myka, for once, went on as if she could not in fact hear Helena’s thoughts. “But undergraduate you, she’s still there. And me, I’m still… this body that I am. The one that got sick. The one that always makes people want to build a fence around me.”

“Put you under glass,” Helena murmured. Barricades and bell jars: those might have been her best hope for a solution. Physical, built barriers.

“What? Oh, right. You and Varsha. You’d just better not be thinking I’m wall-colored wallpaper.”

Helena said, because she could not help herself, “You’re everything.”

That made Myka laugh. “See, no, you went for the romantic answer, but that would mean I’m wall-colored wallpaper _too_.”

“You want me to say you _aren’t_ everything,” Helena said, and Myka raised her eyebrows—a challenge. Helena sighed. “You are everything I want. Is that better?”

“That’s a romantic answer that works. I always think of a better answer for something like that the next day, when it’s too late… then again, as we know, you’re pretty fast.”

“Don’t be clever,” Helena grumbled.

Myka laughed. “I would’ve thought you’d be into that kind of thing, but okay. How’s this: let’s do some stress testing. See how fragile I really am. See how fragile _you_ might be.” 

“I’m not fragile at all.” Indignant—mock but not.

“Good.” And that was not at all mock, or mocking.

****

When next they had occasion to pause, as their breathing slowed, Myka raised her head and swiveled it around. “I heard some crashes,” she said.

Helena, who had been attuned to very little but her own body and Myka’s, said, “Did you.”

Myka waved a vague hand at her nightstand. “I don’t _care_. But you knocked down a bunch of books.” She peeked over the side of the bed. “And in the process broke my glasses.”

Helena leaned over Myka’s back, looked for herself. Saw a disaster area. She let herself fall back onto the bed. “Symbolic,” she told the ceiling. She rolled onto her stomach and turned her head to look at Myka. “Are you sure _you_ didn’t knock them down?”

“It’s like you forgot exactly who was doing what. I mean, I get it: you were upset that my body’s not as fragile as you thought, so you went all in on my stuff instead. Impressive.”

Helena mumbled into the pillow, “All I do is destroy things.”

“That’s hyperbolic _and_ counterfactual,” Myka chided. “And so gloomy! I really think you should be enjoying this more. Unless I’ve been doing it wrong.”

(Abigail will complain to Helena in a days-later telephone call: “She’s been strutting around here wearing busted, taped-together glasses like they were some _medal_. Smiling some completely unsecret ‘I’ve got a secret’ smile. Did you punch her in the face?”

“No.” Not something Helena thought she would have needed to declare.

“Please tell me you weren’t doing some kind of weird roleplay where you put her glasses on and _she_ punched _you_.”

“I would not reveal that, even if it were true. But what I will reveal is that no aspect of my sexuality responds to being punched in the face.”

Abigail will pause. “I was about to say ‘too much information,’ but on review, I’ll go with that being a good, solid fact to know about somebody.”)

But of course Helena did not yet know that Myka would consider the breakage a badge of honor… “How can you be so phlegmatic about my having laid waste to your bedroom?” she asked. “Your intentionally picture-perfect bedroom.”

“Oh come on. The furniture’s intact.” Whereupon the facing of her nightstand drawer fell off with an inelegant thunk. Myka waited a beat, then said, “Mostly.” Helena couldn’t stop her chuckle, and Myka continued, “You’re competitive, but you can’t outdo me so easy. I wrecked an entire neighborhood, so what’s one bedroom, comparatively?”

“A far more consequential place.”

“Worth it, just to hear you say that.” Now Myka sighed—an exhalation at once exaggerated and sincere. “Want to break something else?”

Helena gave herself over to it, just for a moment: “Records.”

“If you mean that literally, I regret having to report a sad lack of vinyl in my life. I’ll buy some, though, if you want. For smashing.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“I don’t think you mean that across the board.”

“You think I like it when you’re being silly?”

“I think you do. I think you can’t always tell the difference between when I am and when I’m not, but I think you like it anyway.”

“I think I like…”

“What do you think you like?”

“You,” Helena said, truthfully. Then she said the other true answers that had leapt to mind: “Planning. Building.” It was indeed counterfactual that all Helena did was destroy things, and yet she and Myka would most likely never be able to plan anything, to build anything. All they would have (and she _was_ gloomy) was this small-scale destruction, this pile of books on the floor; this pair of glasses snapped at the bridge, bent at a hinge. This broken nightstand.

Early in her career, Helena had worked for a firm that had taken on the pro bono task of redesigning and rebuilding parts of a small town in Florida after a tropical storm had wreaked havoc upon it. She remembered, though through a hazy smear, the swelter of the aftermath—electricity remained unrestored, which for most meant no air conditioning anywhere but in cars. Her third day there, she’d sat in an idling car, a powder-blue Cadillac owned by a military retiree, in the driveway of what had once been his house, and let the talkative old man tell her every story that came into his head, just for the relief of feeling her clothes unstick themselves from her body. 

A moral capped each tale: “Let the fella with the cane go first else he’ll take it out on your knee” or “Don’t ever trust the grandkid’s word about the alligator.”

Then he said, “I tell you about Ron, next door, yet?” He gestured with a dark, knuckly hand at the house to his left. Unlike his house, it was standing, and it looked, at least to Helena’s green architectural eye, solid. Helena shook her head. “His kids tried to get him to leave, day before it hit. He kept saying he’d been fine through six a’these, they kept saying leave.”

“And did he?” Helena asked.

“Did he what?”

“Leave.”

“Course not. Sat right on the porch till the rain started coming down sideways, then went inside for cocktails. Called me to see if I wanted to come over, so I did. My garage was gone after the first G and T, so I stayed and had a couple more. Guess that saved my life.” He paused, and Helena predicted, to herself, that the moral would most likely be something about the advisability of being close friends with one’s neighbor. But he went on, “Ron left next morning to stay with his daughter in Dothan. Electricity was out, you know, and he hates the heat.”

“He hates the heat, but he lives in Florida,” Helena said.

Her retiree shrugged. “You live where you live.” Was that the moral? Apparently not quite, for he spoke again. “See those columns over there, Ron’s front porch?” The two corner columns matched none of the other architecture in the entire town: some sort of replica-Egyptian monstrosities, with palm caps so elaborate they might have come from the Temple of Horus at Edfu. Helena nodded. “Always liked those. When mine goes back up”—and he gave one sigh as he looked at the matchsticks his house had become—“that’s what I’m getting.”

She told this story, this story about stories, to Myka, as they lay in each other’s arms, still next to their own scene of comparatively small wreckage. “I still don’t know what the moral was,” she admitted.

After a while, Myka said, “I see two: first, when your house is getting itself wrecked by a hurricane, you might as well be drinking a gin and tonic and watching the show, because what else are you going to do about it? The built environment’s just a gesture at safety anyway. A wish.”

“What is the second lesson?”

“I’ve never seen a porch that had Egyptian columns with palm caps.”

“That doesn’t sound like a lesson.”

“But maybe you live next to something and look at it for a while, with a hunger. And then your house collapses.”

“That still doesn’t sound like a lesson.”

“Doesn’t it? I bet your friend in the car could’ve explained it, if you’d asked.”

Helena thought back to the cool of that car. Instead of asking, she had guessed and scoffed internally at it all, with what she had imagined was sophistication, but now, with time, she recognized as childish, self-protective cynicism: a gesture at safety. A wish.

****

Helena awoke in the night; she realized, after a “where am I” moment, that Myka was not there in bed with her.

Alone in a bed not her own, Helena thought, _I should leave_. She was certain she should leave this bed and never come back. She sat up—and she considered that it had been quite some time since she’d been in a bed not her own, in a dark bedroom not her own.

Myka came back and slid into what Helena realized would be “her side” of the bed. A bed shared once, sides decided. To distract herself from carrying that thought on, Helena turned her sitting body halfway around, toward that side that now belonged to Myka, and said her previous thought out loud: “It’s been quite some time. Since I’ve been in a bedroom—a bed—not my own.”

“I’m glad you chose mine.” Myka’s voice was warm. Deep.

“‘Chose’ doesn’t seem the most precise word. Given all the… fate.”

“Call it destiny instead. Sounds more upbeat.” Still warm. A little less deep.

“I shouldn’t call it anything. I should leave, never mind the fate, or the destiny. Or the choosing. Any of it.”

Myka curled herself into a C around Helena’s hips. “I know,” she said.

“We can’t do this again,” Helena told that womanly curve of body.

“I know.”

“Because it’s one thing if I come here and pretend. For your mother, for Rick.”

“I know.”

“But if I come here and mean it.”

“I know.”

“Stop saying that! Say something different. That’s what you do: you say things I don’t expect. Do that now.”

Myka sat up now, put her arms around Helena’s shoulders. “I can’t. Because you’re right. Up to now, it’s all been fun and games. Well, and cancer, but you see my point.”

“I wish I didn’t have to. It’s better when I don’t.”

“Then don’t.” The arms tightened. “Right now, don’t. Close your eyes, and I’ll close mine. Or we can both keep our eyes open, because it’s still the middle of the night, and I can find what I want in the dark. And I know how beautiful you are, you with that smile. Doesn’t matter if I can see you.”

“You don’t need to say something like _that_.”

“Why not?”

“I’m already in love.”

“I want to keep you that way,” Myka said, and she accompanied that with a decisive kiss on Helena’s left deltoid. Her lips lingered there.

Helena tried to resist the lips. “It’s pointless, and you know it,” she said. Then the lips were joined by a tongue, and she gave in. “Yet you do seem to be doing a reasonable job of it so far—of course you’ve had to work very hard. The stratagems.”

“I _have_ worked hard. Just keeping track of who knew what when.”

“Before tonight,” Helena reminded her, “a significant gap loomed in your knowledge of who knew what when.”

“I didn’t even know it was a gap. Besides, same goes for you. Before tonight, I mean,” Myka reminded back.

Helena said, “But we both know everything now.”

Myka grabbed the sides of Helena’s head and turned it such that they were face to face. “Okay, I’ll say it again: I didn’t even know it was a gap. You’re very bad at understanding what _any_ of the lessons are.”

****

In the morning, Helena woke and stretched and wondered. Not alone in a bed not her own, she felt Myka stretching beside her. Was she wondering too? “I have no idea what to do now,” Helena said.

“_No_ idea?” Myka stopped stretching. She nuzzled close to Helena and kissed her earlobe.

“Well. Aside from that.”

“Couldn’t we keep it secret? Nobody knows we even know each other, not really.”

“We could sneak around and do this—” Helena began, and Myka interrupted with an eager, “We could?”, to which Helena shook her head and said, “But I don’t want to.”

“You don’t? Admittedly I’m not some athlete or anything, but I thought it was—”

“Of course I do want to.”

“I’m not really following.”

Helena said, with severity, “Then you understand how I _regularly_ feel, talking to you.” Myka blinked a blink of innocence. Helena sighed. “What I was saying, poorly, is that I don’t want to do _just_ this. Which is what I fear we’d be reduced to, if we had to sneak around. We’d… have sex. Furtively.”

“Don’t you think sneaking around and having furtive sex could be… sexy?”

“Forgive me, but that isn’t enough. Not for me, and certainly not for me with you. I want more.”

“All or nothing?” Myka asked, and Helena nodded, oddly ashamed of her reluctance to… settle. Which seemed to unnecessarily devalue what she and Myka had spent much of the night doing, but—that thought, Myka read; she kissed Helena and said, “You dazzle me. How can we possibly be so good together? So right for each other?”

“Well. First, the fate.”

“Destiny! Or how about ‘divine intervention’?”

“But also, H. pylori, so maybe a little less than divine. Bacterial intervention.”

“Mysterious ways.”

“But second, as discussed, we seem to be in love. With each other, no less. That lends a shine to the proceedings.”

“You’re saying it’ll wear off?”

“Experience suggests.”

“You’re being gloomy again. But remember, you never experienced being in love with me before. So we’ll see.”

“You _are_ unique in my experience,” Helena said, and “_See_,” Myka whispered in her ear. “Which is why I wouldn’t be able to bear keeping you hidden. But as I continue to try to maintain, I’m not going to put other people’s livelihoods at risk. I don’t suppose I could talk you into coming to work for me?”

“First, Abigail would kill me if I quit, but second, I don’t think that’s a good idea. I mean, I’m sure you’re great to work for, but—”

“I’m next to impossible to work for. Ask Steve.”

“Mmm. Sold. Or I would be, but I think that kind of takes the original problem and… doesn’t change it. Pretty serious conflict of interest, me sleeping with the boss. And believe me, I would be sleeping with the boss. If we worked in the same office? On every available surface, I would be sleeping with the boss.”

“I see your point. Would that I could fully _embrace_ your point.”

“You can right now,” Myka whispered, and so Helena did.

Much later, Helena said, “Perhaps you’ve always wanted to start your own firm, and now is the time.”

Myka didn’t ask which conversation they were resuming. “Now is the time for me to keep my government-employee health insurance,” she said, and Helena had to nod her understanding. “Also I don’t think I want to compete with you in the urban design space, and I don’t think you want to compete with me either. I mean the antagonism could be really really hot, but honestly.”

“I see those points also.” Helena felt herself becoming sulky, but what was a more reasonable reaction? “Why is this so impossible? Where are the points in our favor?”

“There aren’t any points in our favor. In the first memo we got from the mayor-elect’s staff, they said they’d whack us for even the appearance of bribery, which they very helpfully defined as ‘a public official agreeing to receive and accept something of value in exchange for being influenced in the performance of an official act.’”

“But what in the world is the thing of value in this case?”

“Don’t sell yourself short,” Myka said. She delivered another earlobe-kiss. “‘Personal companionship’ qualifies as something of value, and I have to say I’m finding your companionship to be… that.”

“But I’m not influencing any act on your part.”

“Hm. You’re influencing me not to get out of bed right now.”

“_Official_ act.”

“I am _officially_ not getting out of bed. But also, the appearance: you won the contract. Honestly I wish you weren’t so smart.”

“What?”

“Then you wouldn’t have won it, and we could just do this all the time. Then again if you weren’t so smart, why would I want to do this with you all the time?”

“You’re giving me a headache.”

“No I’m not,” Myka said. And no, she wasn’t. She was giving Helena every reason to never get out of bed. To do this all the time. Myka went on, “There’s a poster hanging in the hallway right outside my office that asks, ‘Is your good name worth a cup of coffee?’”

Helena would have raised her head in slight bafflement, but it was resting so perfectly against Myka’s shoulder. Instead she said, “I don’t think that means what it is intended to mean.”

“I know.”

Now Helena did lift her head. “In fact does it not mean the exact opposite of what it is intended to mean?”

“I’m pretty sure. I tried to explain that what they meant to ask was ‘Isn’t your good name worth a whole lot more than a cup of coffee,’ but they’d already printed the posters and didn’t really welcome my input.”

“I welcome your input.”

“Sounds dirty,” Myka said, with a rumbling chortle that made her entire body vibrate.

“In any event I’m not buying you a cup of coffee.”

“Cheapskate. _Dirty_ cheapskate.” Myka kissed Helena then, her mouth aggressive. “Just imagine what I’d be willing to do if you actually did buy me that coffee.”

“You are in fact not shy,” Helena pronounced, and received another body-shaking chortle as a reward. “Why _can’t_ we do this all the time? Couldn’t you simply recuse yourself from anything involving me?”

“If I could, don’t you think I would? I’d wear a badge to that effect: ‘Don’t utter the name Helena Wells around me unless it’s to remark on how smart and hot she is and how lucky I am.’ But we don’t have enough people anymore for me not to be involved, going forward, and going forward is the problem—all this influence you’d be in a brand-new position to… exert.”

“Brand-new positions. Exertion. Now who sounds dirty?”

“That was on purpose. Anyway, everyone—up to and including my boss and the mayor—would find your timing suspicious. Right when I can’t bow out of anything?”

“That’s ultimately my fault, isn’t it. The loss of your fired colleague.”

“It’s true they never replaced him, but the whole thing was his fault, not yours. And he’d probably be gone by now. We just had a round of layoffs, because apparently ethics are so expensive that you can’t have those and personnel too. It’s the budget’s fault.”

“Bacteria, myself, a budget. Ethics.” Helena couldn’t keep the pessimism out of her voice. She had raised her neck a bit, to look at Myka, but now she let it fall back, heavy without hope.

Myka touched Helena’s face. “Maybe we can sneak around until we get somebody corrupt back in office. Somebody who doesn’t care.”

“Then I suppose you actually could direct all the contracts my way.”

“I wouldn’t, though,” Myka said.

“Your ethics confuse me.”

“No they don’t.”

No, they didn’t. Helena said, “Ethically, it seems we have no choice but to act like adults. Acknowledge that while this might have worked so well, in the right circumstance, at the right time…”

“This is not the right circumstance or the right time?”

The words were quiet, and the factual nature of them made Helena’s gut churn. “I wish you wouldn’t agree with me on this,” she said, just as quiet.

“I don’t agree with you,” Myka said, but that did not go any length toward settling Helena’s agitation. “I’m not going to argue with you, not right now—I can see it’d be futile—but I don’t agree with you.”

So much for any factual nature of what Myka was saying. “Once again, the sense you make is _none_,” Helena told her. “It’s a circumstance! It exists, regardless of your agreement or disagreement.”

“What’s a circumstance, anyway,” Myka said.

Against that additional quiet musing, Helena snapped, “Don’t ask ridiculous questions. I have to leave now.” Sharp, sharp. Too sharp. But she had to sharpen herself, for how else could she possibly cut herself away from Myka? “I have to leave now,” she repeated, softer.

“I know,” Myka said, softer still.

“Don’t say that.”

Myka said nothing else, not as Helena arose from the bed, not as Helena gathered her clothes. She pointed at the appropriate corner of the room when Helena could not find her shirt.

Not until Helena was fully dressed (certainly not fully composed), not until Myka herself was clothed, minimally, in jeans and a T-shirt, and not until they were back in that no-longer-magic foyer did Myka ask, “Can I say you shouldn’t forget to take your book of koans with you?”

“Does it matter?”

“How can you of all people have failed to understand _this_ lesson?”

“The only moral you definitively extracted was ‘Drink gin and tonic amid destruction,’” Helena accused. “What does that have to do with koans?”

Myka snorted. “It practically _is_ a koan. I meant the _other_ lesson—or, I guess, one of the others: books matter.”

“I already know that.”

“Do you? Then act like it. Take your book with you, because something **_I_** already know is that you’ll think it’s a bad idea if I use it to play the ‘wait!’ game again. And I’d do it, too.”

Helena took the book up in her hands, opened it, placed her right index finger where it chose to land. 

“Maybe also a bad idea to use it to play a divination game,” Myka said. “It isn’t the_ I Ching_.”

Helena gave her an “I already know that too” head-nod. Then she quoted, “‘When you realize the error of your ways, you should try to correct them. But how many people are capable of doing this?’” She looked up at Myka. “I am most likely incapable of doing this. But I would have tried. For you.”

“I’m going to remember that you said that.”

Helena kissed her then—a “yes, remember it” kiss, but also a warning: “no, don’t.” And when she at last tore herself away, the “yes, remember” and the “no, don’t” became instructions to herself, words to take to heart about this night.

TBC 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> original part 11 Tumblr tags: so very very talky once again, a series of scenes in bed, in which people just talk!, but of course I care most about how people speak with each other, writing conversations is extremely difficult, you can tell when 'writers' don't have much feel for or experience with dialogue, because if any line is serving only one function in a scene, you should throw it out, (unless it's genuinely funny), (I'll forgive a lot for a laugh,) I know I haven't adhered to this rule in this piece, because I haven't had time to cut ruthlessly, but cutting lines is also difficult, because then you have to re-concern yourself with flow, for conversations move and build with their own logic, and when you start cutting, it's like taking steps out of a mathematical proof, you have to come up with a different valid way to get from point A to point B


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I did say this piece was going to be all over the place, right? Partaking of overused devices, saying nothing new, letting characters yammer. Previously on Helicobacter, two people spent what I’m reasonably sure was a beautiful night together; their doing so had become pretty much inevitable (given the dictates of those overused devices)… but that beautiful night Should Not Have Happened (ditto)… anyway, in the interest of saying nothing new, this is mostly a move-the-ball-methodically-down-the-field installment. From bad to even a little worse to??? I mean, also speaking of overused devices, when is it literally darkest? Don’t go looking for subtlety...

_I am tired_, Helena thought. On a workday morning, stationed at her desk in her office, that was not so unusual a sensation. Her thought, however, continued: _But “tired” does not begin to render the fullness of my condition. I am fatigued. Depleted. Exhausted_.

She had not slept, other than the occasional fitful doze, in the four days since she… had slept. In a bed not her own. Helena was exhausted, and everyone else in the world was most likely annoyingly well-rested. Her employees certainly seemed to be, and Helena had no trouble imagining that that blessed status was shared. By _everyone_. Everyone but Helena, and under those circumstances of clear and unwarranted personal exclusion from even that lesser paradise, any _feelings_ Helena might have been having were suspect.

The neighborhood model-piece, with its stupidly defiant, what’s-a-circumstance, books-are-important trees might as well have been a formal portrait of Myka Bering. Top of mind indeed. Helena sat at her desk and sulked in the model-piece’s general direction and resisted the urge to throw it across the room.

There was no way around the situation, so Helena’s feelings, whatever their force and character, were not only suspect, but also, and most crucially, immaterial.

She had been ignoring the book of koans, despite the fact that it accompanied her everywhere she went. But now, exhausted and thus defenseless as she was, she opened it and found the entry about divided souls and thrashing lobsters. She read the main case and the prose commentary, hearing them in Myka’s voice. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” She read the verse commentary, which spoke unhelpfully of blessings. She then read Heine’s discussion of all these. “While the current case functions on an abstract philosophical level when understood as a scholastic exercise,” he explained, “it is important to recognize that the case is clearly based on a famous T’ang ghost tale recorded in the _Li-hun chi_, expressing the theme of duty versus passion…”

She did throw the book—the movement started as a ferocious jerk of a sneer on her lips and conveyed itself through her shoulder, elbow, hand, fingers. But then, pressed by guilt, she stood up, walked to the book, retrieved it from the floor. The cover hadn’t bent, the spine hadn’t broken, and Helena was relieved. As if she would otherwise have had to explain to Myka what had happened? But of course she would not have an opportunity to explain anything to Myka.

Steve came in; he didn’t knock, but he held up his hands in what seemed intended as a comical version of defense as he asked, “Did you break anything that needs to be fixed right away?” He gestured at the book Helena held. “Furthering your education?”

“No to the former, yes to the latter,” Helena said.

“By practicing your drop-kick? Heine’s not a bad choice—for the education, that is. Profoundly wrong for drop-kicking.”

“Pitching, as it happens; not drop-kicking. And it was a gift.”

Steve breathed. “Any projectile-based activity. Also, listen to the sound of me not asking.”

“The answer wouldn’t surprise you.”

“I’ve given up being surprised. You’d be amazed at how much more calm your life becomes.”

“I would not be amazed,” Helena informed him.

“You’d be surprised.” Steve said this as his mouth curved into the slightest of smiles.

“Are you making fun of me?”

Now his shoulders rose into the slightest of shrugs. “You’re the one holding a book of koans. It’s a good book.”

“True. And yet I threw it across the room.”

“Well, I’m a good assistant.”

Helena sighed a sigh that was in no way slight. “Point taken.”

****

Days passed; they aggregated into weeks. Helena told herself everything was fine. Was becoming fine. More fine rather than less fine. Case in point: she kept the three photographs of Myka—confusion’s ghost, bookstore smile, and frustration (she always ideated it as “intimate frustration,” then edited the adjective out of her thought)—on her telephone, but while she was tempted daily, and from time to time hourly, to make the third her home screen, she did not do it. She congratulated herself on each occasion when, after looking at that photograph and considering it (and editing away its adjective), she retained her generic view of Notre Dame du Haut.

She had sent that third photo to Charles weeks ago, in the immediate aftermath, with exactly the sense of mournful pride she had known she’d feel.

Charles had called her immediately, despite the fact that it was the middle of the night in London. As the call connected, Helena heard, rather than “hello,” a whispered, “She’s adorable.”

“No she isn’t,” Helena said.

“Are your eyes damaged?” he demanded, at his normal volume.

“Don’t wake your wife,” Helena said. “And ‘adorable’ is inadequate.”

“At any rate the two of you will make an adorable couple. I mean in the wedding photos of course; she does not look to me like one with whom it would be wise to trifle.”

“I am not trifling with her.”

“So when is the wedding.”

“I am not doing anything with her. I can’t _have her_.”

“Nonsense. Of course you can. Because,” and here he snickered, but not meanly, “you sound far too tragic at the moment to be doing anything but _renouncing_ this Grail that you have _achieved_.”

“I did not _achieve_ her,” Helena told him. “That sounds as terrible as you meant it to. And even if I did, it doesn’t matter.”

“Doesn’t it? Did it?”

She would have preferred not to answer, but he made a small interrogative noise. “Enormously,” she admitted in answer to it.

He made the noise again, a little “mm?”

“I told you. I can’t.”

“Of course you can! Be creative!”

“I don’t know how.”

“Then you’re going to make a terrible architect. I’ve heard a rumor that design is involved.”

“There is nothing to be creative _about_.”

“Wreck. Her. Car. You’ll have to be creative in order to avoid injuring her, and I suppose yourself as well, but experience suggests that everything will work out beautifully after that.”

She wanted to hit him. Twenty-five years ago, she could and would have done so. Now, however, she said, adult and reasonable and true, “Anything I do will injure not only the two of us but everyone around us, or at the very least their employment. So I can do nothing at all. Worse, I _must_ do nothing at all.”

“Aggressively putting others’ interests before your own? Why in the world are you being so _good_, Lancelot?”

She still wanted to hit him, but this time she corrected him instead. “Lancelot doesn’t renounce the Grail; he renounces the Queen.”

That sent Charles into not-quite-silent laughter. Wheezing, really. “I believe my point is unaffected. Would you prefer Parsifal?”

“I’m certainly a fool. Not pure, however.”

“Making a good try at it, _however_.” He uttered the “mm?” yet again.

“Well. I’m compelled to try. Otherwise… otherwise I won’t deserve her.” She had never thought to say that out loud. Why had she said it now? It sounded puerile.

But Charles, miraculous to say, seemed to understand. His voice was low again. “And yet if you hold to this position of such spotless, deserving virtue…”

“I can’t have her,” Helena said, her throat charged with the near-tears of frustration. Of anger, too, at her failure to resist—at her failure, in the end, to refrain from doing what she always did: exactly what she wanted. She _hadn’t_ put others’ interests above her own. If she had, she would not be so miserable now. Making her new try, knowing exactly what she… oh, fine. Exactly what she was _renouncing_.

Charles said, “It’s a pretty conundrum.” He was attempting to jolly her out of it. “Practically Lancelotian, when you think about it.”

“That is not a word!” Helena exclaimed, then quieted, so as not to encourage him to shout back. “And I do not want to think about it.”

“And yet clearly you have done very little _but_ think about it. Uncreatively, but even so.”

“How can every course of action be both so right and so wrong? How can it all _feel_ so awful?” Those near-tears were nearer.

The jollying, predictably, continued: “Lord, what melodrama; I can hear the swelling strings now. The situation cannot possibly be so dire as your histrionics make it seem.”

Helena coughed, then reminded him that his own past was not histrionic-free. He humored her by taking umbrage, and also by taking over and talking about the past. After a while, he asked, “Better now?” and Helena was able to answer him with a relatively strong “yes.”

After that, every time they communicated—and Charles must have been concerned about her, for such communication was occurring far more frequently than usual—he would ask, “Have you wrecked her car yet? Or the equivalent?” Helena would say no, and Charles would chastise her for being, first, insufficiently creative, but second, insufficiently devoted to melodramatic cliché (his helpful suggestion: “Creative melodrama! You could try tying someone to railroad tracks—perhaps yourself, so that she might rescue you? Or not, thus putting everyone out of some misery?”), until at last there came a point at which he declared “There is no reasoning with you!” and Helena said “You have at no point attempted to _reason_ with me,” and he told her “That is because there is no reasoning with you.” In his next call, he said he thought it best not to bring up Myka’s name again between them, and she agreed and thanked him.

Helena took his capitulation as a sign that she should… do something. Something ruthless. Coldblooded. She was holding her telephone, so she tapped her way to the first photograph of Myka. It wasn’t a good photograph: not good as a representation of Myka—Myka should not have had to wear even that ghost of confusion on her face—and certainly not any aesthetic good _as_ a photo. She deleted it.

The second picture, the bookstore smile, that was a deeper cut. It was, after all, a photo of a lovely, smiling woman. Easier to justify on aesthetic grounds—but then again, its visual appeal was terribly clichéd: a picture of a smiling face. So. Deleted. Ruthless.

As for the third. She should have sent it immediately—cold-bloodedly—on its electronic way as well, for it too was a picture of a smiling face. But in this smile was the frustration… yes, and the intimacy. _It is a document of those_, she told herself. A document, nothing more, yet also nothing less. She was still glad to have this proof, and even to have shown it to Charles. “‘Unhelpful’ describes your entire family,” Myka had said as she smiled. Under the right circumstances, at the right time, Myka and Charles would have been able to meet. Perhaps even at that wedding that now would never take place… together, they would have tormented Helena on a level several orders of magnitude greater than either could have managed apart.

Helena added a never-wedding to the list of never-things she wanted to never think about again.

In the meantime, as the neighborhood project neared completion, the city began budgeting for upcoming construction. Helena had held out a small, ridiculous, magical thought that if she did not look at the calls for proposals, she could pretend that they did not exist; she could contact Myka in complete innocence and tell her that she could not see how any were suitable—for, not having seen them, how could she possibly have seen any as suitable? She thought Charles might consider this creative.

She should have taken up car-wrecking instead. Or tied herself to a railroad track. The week before the official “opening” of the neighborhood, two of Helena’s employees came to her with a detailed, well-begun bid on a new branch library and adjacent elementary school. She could think of no good reason, no reasonable reason, to dismiss their very good work. “That’s the idea,” Myka had said. They would prove themselves, and they would then build on that success. These smart people who were foolish enough to work for Helena deserved that opportunity.

Myka did not attend the neighborhood’s ribbon-cutting ceremony. Abigail was present, however, and she stood next to Helena as they watched the mayor wield an oversized pair of scissors against a red strip of plastic extending between two decorative lampposts in the fountainless square. News crews and photographers recorded the mayor’s actions in the moment, but Helena focused on that thick red ribbon as it stretched, then broke, against the blade and fluttered down, daintily, to paint the paving stones. Very unlike the red violent blood with which this all began…

Under the applause, Abigail murmured, “Noticed that you’re going for the library.”

“And school,” Helena murmured back. “And surrounding recreational green space.”

“_Myka_ noticed that you’re going for the library.” It wasn’t a jab; Abigail had dampened those considerably. A few weeks after the phone call about punching and glasses and pride, she had informed Helena that Myka had obtained new glasses. “Pretty sure she hates them,” Abigail had said.

Helena had replied, “I haven’t seen them. But I hate them too.” She’d brought no humor at all to her words. Abigail hadn’t jabbed much after that.

The ceremony ended; the officials and journalists dispersed. Helena regarded the empty plaza. She felt no future promise—only vacancy.

Abigail saw what she wasn’t looking at. “There is no fountain,” she said. “It was funnier before.”

“It was.”

“Might be again. Sometime. Then there is?”

“No one can wait forever. For a fountain or anything else.”

“Are you talking about you or her?”

“No one.”

****

Myka was involved in the bid process for the library and school. Not in person, but Helena was among the recipients of group emails from her. Helena in turn sent group emails that included Myka among their addressees. “P.S.,” she could not add, clandestinely, “I look at your photo. I don’t sleep well. I carry a book that is not the _I Ching_ everywhere I go. I have not seen your new glasses, but I would break them if I could.”

Once Helena’s firm was awarded the contract—Helena had all along had what she would in times past have called a “good feeling” about the process; now she thought she would never feel “good” about such a thing again—it was of course only a matter of time before she and Myka would have to interact directly in some manner. Some meeting, some call. The city staff were spread so thin that it could not be avoided. In any case, Myka’s supervisor most likely did not even remember, at this late date, that there might be any problems with appearances, that Helena had spent a day and a night next to Myka’s hospital bed. And of course Helena did not know how Myka… felt. Anymore. About anything other than the eventual existence of a library.

Everything would most likely be fine. If Helena could keep herself under control whenever the direct interaction occurred, then everything would be fine. More fine rather than less fine.

Even as the library construction got underway, however, she avoided being physically present at as many meetings as possible, sending others in her place, telling herself that certainly she needed no more experience in such matters, while the young and green did. The direct interaction, when it happened, would be fine—more fine rather than less fine—yet that did not mean there was any need to _invite_ it.

But Steve told her, “I think the city contingent’s starting to doubt that you’re actually managing the project. Take half an hour and show your face for a blueprint review—say strong words, correct somebody about something or other, give yourself some cover, and you’ll be fine.” There it had been again: fine. Helena would be fine.

Not long after receiving this wise recommendation, she stepped into an empty elevator in the lobby of City Hall, preparing herself for the suggested blueprint review. At which she would say strong words and issue corrections. She was both consoled and disappointed by the fact that Myka was not scheduled to attend.

These elevators were dark, atmospheric, decades-old relics, inviting a historically minded passenger such as Helena to imagine such a time when an elevator operator would have stood by the floor-button panel—which would then have been state of the art—to save passengers from the technologically confounding task of floor selection. On deserted days like today, she had no trouble conjuring a vision of that man or woman’s pleasant ghost. “Six, please,” she would say to him or her, and he or she would smile and nod and say “yes ma’am.” He or she would provide agreeable, nonintrusive company for the journey as well.

The car creaked itself to a start, crawled, then slowed and stopped as it reached the second floor. Helena was sighing down at the marble tiles on which she stood, resigning herself to an interminable trip up to six (it would at least give her time to come up with appropriately strong words), when she realized that the person who had come through the doors, here on two, had stepped very near her. Very unexpectedly near. That seemed neither nonintrusive nor agreeable, as far as company went. She looked up.

All thoughts of the quiet, polite past fled; Helena in that moment thanked god for the genuine lack of any other presence, ghostly or otherwise, in the car, because here was the direct interaction: all Helena wanted to do was touch her—but also, stand and breathe her—_but also_, speak to her and be spoken to by her. The word “starving” had not visited Helena before this moment.

“Move over there,” she said, desperate. She was going to raise her hands if Myka did not arm’s-length herself away _this second_. So much for keeping herself under control.

Myka said, “You’re joking.” But she took a step back.

“We are four floors from my destination! Even if it doesn’t stop at each one on the way for other—”

“We’re only three floors from _my_ destination. But my memory must be going; I thought you were fast.”

Not the bedroom. She could not think about that. “We agreed that this is neither the right circumstance nor the right time!”

“No, I said I _didn’t_ agree. It was a while ago, but I bet you remember yelling at me about it then, too.”

“You _must_ agree that an elevator in your workplace is wrong on both counts. Particularly as we haven’t so much as _spoken_ in weeks. Months.”

Myka said, “What if we got stuck? I know you’re destructive.” That put them right back _again_ in Myka’s bedroom; she wasn’t, at the moment, wearing her glasses, her new glasses, so were they there, on her nightstand, waiting? “You could break this thing if you try.”

“I’d be arrested for vandalizing city property,” Helena said. Her voice was weak.

“But not till _later_. Besides, they’d probably just fine you.”

A little stronger: “I refuse to break the elevator.”

“You _are_ a cheapskate. A beautiful cheapskate.”

“I thought I was a dirty cheapskate.” These words Helena said strong but sullen, in response to which Myka laughed and said, “You’re deliberately _not_ being dirty, which I regret to inform you is _even hotter_.”

Helena, still sullen, accused, “You don’t regret it at all.”

That made Myka smile more widely than she had at any point. “I did say the words _even hotter_ out loud, right?”

“Why are you doing this?” Helena did not bother to define “this”: offering such light and intimate words, pushing Helena to respond in kind. Reminding Helena of what they had done and what it had meant. Everything she had been working, insomniacally and every other way, to forget.

Myka stood silent for a moment, then moved to Helena and kissed her—not long, but not a peck. The way they would kiss if this were real and they had found themselves alone in an elevator together during a workday. A kiss of “you.”

Myka stepped away.

The elevator’s bell dinged; its door opened.

“Bye,” Myka said. She stepped out, then turned back around. Smiled. The smile, too, said “you.”

Helena said, trying to mean it definitively, “Goodbye.”

She wondered if it would do to become the _reclusive_ head of an urban design firm. “She never goes to meetings,” the professional community would whisper, and they would speculate as to why, but Helena would just… not.

****

Helena had tried not to let herself acknowledge that she would not sleep, that night of the encounter in the elevator, but determinedly not considering that elephant led to the expected result: hour after hour found her calculating what length of time spent lying down in the dark constituted “a good try.” She had put off getting into bed—in her comparatively underdecorated bedroom, the furniture-facings of which had never been destroyed, and where stacks of books towered undisturbed—until well after midnight, in hopes that the weight of the dense deep of night would be enough to push her body and brain into ignoring her thoughts. She gave up after an hour and a half of checking her telephone to answer her incessant, wide-awake “what time is it now?” wondering.

She went to make coffee in the kitchen, which now struck her as underdecorated, like the bedroom. Not elegantly spare, but unthought. Perhaps what she needed was an entirely new space, or a set of entirely new spaces, in which she could think entirely differently. Perhaps now was the time to occupy herself with thoughts of such spaces, with their design and decoration and—

Her telephone, sitting on the countertop next to the coffeemaker, informed her that someone was calling. It informed her also that that someone was Myka. She considered not answering. Direct interaction in the middle of the night… it would do nothing but lead to more restless insomnia in the empty nights to come.

She answered the call with a defeated “What is it?”, trying to counterfeit the roughness of having been awakened from sound sleep. 

It didn’t work. “You’re awake too,” Myka said, and the intrusion of her voice startled Helena—not the fact of Myka talking through the telephone’s speaker, but the realization that Myka had never been this far into the house. Would never be.

Myka then said, “This isn’t working,” and at those words, Helena winced. Myka couldn’t have known it, but she had exactly echoed Giselle, and Helena knew what that had to mean.

“No, it isn’t,” Helena agreed. Her own exact words in response. Her “goodbye” to Myka in the elevator had been insufficient, and she knew it; this, however, was an ending she recognized. Myka was ready to be definitive about it, that much was clear, and Helena understood, when faced with it, that nothing about seeing Myka would ever have been fine, not without this having been brought to an explicit end. She braced herself, as she had on that long-ago day when Giselle had ended things… and the bracing sent an elastic-snap of guilt through her: how could she put the two demises on even vaguely equal footing? One had been a real relationship, whatever its faults; the other had never really existed. Whatever its delights.

Myka continued, “Okay then, we have to make it work. You know how to work, and so do I.”

Those were not Giselle’s words.

Helena felt a strong clout from her heart, then another. “I do,” she said with what she hoped was great caution, “but… what are we to work at?”

Myka said, with no caution whatsoever, “I’m so glad you asked. Me, I’ve been working on an idea.”

TBC

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> original part 12 tumblr tags: I caution you that the end I have envisioned for this thing may not work at all, but the upcoming twist-it-up-then-wind-it-down parts will at the very least be goofy and happy, and of course involve a lot of talking, I just want to wallow in considering the voices that would speak the words, JM's HG voice is never not compelling, whereas JK's WH!Myka voice wouldn't quite fit here, I hear this JK character as more matter-of-fact, or maybe what I mean is a bit less querulous, a little lower and more solid, it isn't that I don't like how WH!Myka sounds, but rather that I find her less transferable to other contexts (maybe?)


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Previously on Helicobacter, Myka called Helena on the phone. In the middle of the night. Because nobody was asleep. And this part is what ensues during that call. It’s not salacious, so I guess you can take “don’t worry” or “sorry” from me on that as you prefer. (I’m in fact not sorry at all.) As for who Myka’s boss is, I didn’t even try for anything new or interesting there; that’s definitely a “sorry.” Another “sorry” is that in this part, I got lazy with regard to tags and actions—you’re seeing only Helena’s side of the phone conversation, and I could have worked harder to move her around in the space, make her pick objects up and put them down, all the things we do when we’re alone and talking to someone who isn’t present. There’s no excuse for laziness, so I’m calling it what it is. Just to remind you, THIS IS A VERY SILLY STORY.

The idea of Myka working on an idea—well, that provoked in Helena yet more heart-hammering, accompanied by nervous speculation: who would be pretending to have what relationship with whom? _For_ whom would the pretending take place? And who would be presumed, possibly erroneously, to have foreknowledge, or no foreknowledge, of the relationship that was being pretended but was also most likely real? Helena leaned her upper body forward, onto the counter, beside her telephone, hoping that the cool of the manufactured stone against her torso might calm her… it was no help. “I wish you wouldn’t,” she lied.

“I don’t believe you. Like I said, we have to make this work.”

“We don’t have to,” Helena said. Not a lie, but close.

“How can you say that? It’s practically a religious obligation at this point.”

Helena heard herself make Charles’s question-noise.

“You’re awfully cute,” Myka said, and did that have to do with the noise itself or with what she saw as Helena’s dimwittedness? “Call it karma if you want, but honestly, why would any god who’d sell me your undergraduate city planning textbook and give me cancer and make me throw up on you and put Rick in the hospital they took me to even bother to _get up in the morning_ after all that if the point weren’t for us to at least _try_ to be together?”

“Why indeed.” Helena had to grant that it all did incline one to, in the manner of Myka’s mother, sigh and say words about destiny.

“I mean even if we’re going with karma, we have to help bring about that inevitable result. So I’ve been thinking a lot about ethics.”

Helena turned her back to the telephone, so she could pretend that Myka was there with her, standing behind her. “I have too.”

“But I bet,” pretend-Myka said, “you’ve been thinking about them as _barriers_. Like fences. Glass to keep somebody under. Right?”

“Hmph” was all Helena could muster, because of course Myka was right. The sound of Myka’s voice, which in the manner of mobile phones faded and strengthened, cutting out then back in, made her envision Myka’s image, there behind her, as a ghostly flicker… here, immateriality was the barrier. Entirely paradoxical. Would Myka come up with something similarly paradoxical with regard to ethics? Ethics as the absence of morality? 

Myka answered this unspoken question with the non sequitur of another question: “Do you know what a circumstance actually is?”

_ Model trees _ , was Helena’s immediate thought, but the real memory-echo in her head was “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” She asked, with some trepidation, “What do you mean?”

“Circumstance. The word. Its etymology.”

“Circum. ‘Around,’ obviously. And stance… I don’t know.” Shameful to admit. “Something to do with one’s position?”

“Don’t sound so embarrassed; I didn’t know either. It’s from the Latin _stare_, means ‘to stand.’ So the circumstance is everything standing, everything _existing_, all around us. _That’s_ the barrier.”

“The circumstance.”

“Exactly. Not some mayoral rule _governing it_ that says I can’t kiss you. So the circumstance is what has to change. And here’s the good news: it already has.”

She made it sound so appealing, and even better, so _true_. Helena, trying to be the voice of realism, said, “No it hasn’t.”

“Don’t be so sure. You can’t step in the same river twice, right? I’m pretty sure that a circumstance plus time becomes a different circumstance. We need the right people to recognize that. That’s why I’ve been working on this idea.”

Helena tried to gird herself with cynicism as she said, “All right. What is the idea?”

“What if I got sick again?”

That seemed yet another non sequitur of a question. “I don’t see how that is anything but the present circumstance _minus_ time. I also don’t see how it is an idea.”

“I don’t believe anybody’s heart is made of stone,” Myka then said.

_ You have importuned her to say things you don’t expect _ , Helena reminded herself. “I’m not completely certain I agree, but I _am_ completely certain I don’t understand what that has to do with any circumstance at all.”

“See, let’s say I have a relapse.”

At that, Helena whirled around to face the telephone—but Myka could not _see_ her indignation, so Helena barked, as firmly as she could, “No. You will not ingest H. pylori intentionally. You have nothing to prove, about ulcers or anything else, and there can be no benefit to putting yourself in that bullet’s path again. Absolutely not.”

“I’d say I’m pretty sure you’re worth the risk—and I _am_ pretty sure—but that wasn’t what I had in mind.”

“I am genuinely afraid to ask.”

“I don’t really have a relapse. I have a fake one. And you find out about it, and you come racing to be by my side.”

“You’re proposing a deathbed—or, I hope, sickbed—confession of some sort?”

“Right, because here’s the kicker: in front of my boss.”

“I don’t see how this solves the problem.”

“We are going to melt her not-made-of-stone heart.”

“First, you are making an unwarranted assumption,” Helena said, and Myka made an exaggerated version of the interrogative noise. As if she wanted to make fun of both Helena and Charles—though of course she could not have wanted to make fun of Charles. But Helena gave a response of the sort she would have given to her brother: “That her heart is made of some substance with a melting point lower than that of some unspecified stone.”

“I see that my actual unwarranted assumption was the notion that you could just leave the poor metaphors alone.”

“You’re the one who mixed them,” Helena noted. “But second, if Jane Lattimer is one to be moved by sentiment, why can’t we melt her heart, whatever its composition, by pleading our case? Saying that we want to be together?”

“Because then she’d know we’ve been sneaking around behind her back since that first hospital incident.”

“But then why would we declare our love in this second hospital incident? If I haven’t seen you since the first?”

Myka said, greatly smug, “Because I know something you don’t know. Well, two things. No, three—or wait, four—”

“This comes as no surprise. And I’m sure you should continue counting.”

“The first thing is, you’ve been emailing me. Privately.”

“No I haven’t.”

“Yes you have.”

“No I haven’t.”

“You need to listen to me really carefully: yes you have.”

Helena squinted at the telephone. Could that prompt it to make Myka’s words make more sense? “I have? Aren’t I far more ethical than that?”

“You haven’t done it as you.”

“I’ve done it as… whom, exactly?” She dreaded the answer.

“Rick.”

“I’ve been emailing you, but as Rick.”

“Right.”

“And so,” Helena said, turning her back once again on the telephone and the voice of absurdity emanating from it, “the logical conclusion to be drawn, regarding myself, is that I have _lost my mind_.”

Myka, cheerful: “If you look at it right, that’s basically the plan.”

Helena looked over her shoulder. “The plan is that I have lost my mind.”

“Over me! See, what happened was, you found me irresistible. In the hospital, that first time.”

Which prompted Helena to picture Myka in her hospital bed. Pale, vulnerable—the tempt-fate notion of pretending their way through it all again made Helena consider refusing to participate, no matter what Myka wanted. She could in such a way give Myka her protection one last time… but of course what Myka had said about being irresistible was true. Feeling very much at war with herself, Helena acquiesced, saying, “That, I can affirm.”

“Good. Certain parts of this conversation had me thinking maybe you’d changed your position. But so, mind lost, and after that… I haven’t quite worked this part out yet, but I think you ran into Rick. And of course the topic of me came up.”

“Of course. My poor lost mind wandering where it would.”

Helena could hear, and picture, the smile Myka wore as she continued her description of the “plan”: “You’d been trying to find a way to stay in touch with me, despite being so very very ethical and never wanting to do anything that would put livelihoods at risk. You said something romantic about that, and he was feeling guilty about how he did me wrong, so he agreed to facilitate you emailing me as him. Just so you could keep hearing my voice, even electronically.”

“Have you noticed that you and your charms are the stars of this story? Why haven’t _you_ been emailing _me_ as someone else because _I’m_ so irresistible?”

“I’m sorry, whose plan is this?”

“Point taken. Carry on.”

“Okay, so you’ve been emailing me as him. And here’s the part where _you_ get to be the awesome one: I think I’m falling for him again.”

“I don’t see how I’m notably awesome in that scenario. I don’t see how I’m notably _part of_ that scenario.”

Myka exhaled with noise, and she dropped her voice. “On the basis of _your words_.”

“Oh.”

Myka said, returning to her jaunty “plan” voice, “History repeating. It’s elegant.”

“It’s… something. So how does this resolve?”

“I have a relapse. I go back to the hospital. Rick ends up being my doctor again, and I say, ‘No, he can’t treat me; we’re in love.’”

“In front of Jane Lattimer.”

“Correct. And Rick, who in this show is a quick thinker, says, ‘But it’s not me you’re in love with. I’ve called Cyrano; she’s on her way over.’ And then you bust in.”

_ Charles would love this _ , Helena reflected. In his honor, she asked, “Have you composed an appropriate soundtrack? I can’t imagine a melodrama like this without the swell of strings cueing the audience’s emotions.”

“If you can’t sell this without strings, you don’t deserve me,” Myka pronounced.

“I’m not sure I do deserve you. In any of the ways that might be taken.”

“And so then what you do is, you declare your love.” The smile was still there as Myka said, “If you still feel like it, you undeserving meanie.”

Helena couldn’t help but smile in response as she said, “So according to your plan, we are in the hospital in front of your superior, having declared our love for each other.”

“Right.”

But now Helena stopped smiling. “Whereupon we swear to fall out of love instantly, so as to remain gainfully employed? I don’t see how this indicates any change in circumstance.”

“That’s where the second thing I know comes in.”

“I am on tenterhooks.”

“I’m more productive at work when I’m happy. And my boss knows it.”

“Aren’t most people? And don’t most people know it?”

“That isn’t the thing I know.”

Helena sighed. “Again: tenterhooks.”

“I know that she _remarked_ on it,” Myka said, smug again. “How happy I’ve been lately. How productive.”

“I’ve been miserable! How have you been happy?”

“Pay attention! I’ve been _setting this up_.”

Helena sighed again. She suspected she would be sighing a great deal more. “How is your duplicity not the stuff of legend?”

“Just waiting for my own personal Homer. And then Emily Wilson can translate tales of my duplicity from the Greek.”

“Why would anyone write about you in Greek?”

The telephone emitted its own exaggerated sigh. “Which problem do you want me concentrating on? How to convince someone to write about me in Greek, or how to get my boss to say it’s a good idea for us to be together? I can’t do everything at once!”

“But again, why don’t we just go to her and explain?” Helena asked.

“I would love to go to Emily Wilson and explain that someone needs to write about me in Greek, or even better that someone actually _did_, but sadly I think you mean my boss, which leads me to ask you, are you being dense on purpose? It’s so that I can be _innocent_!”

“What does that make me?” Helena asked. She had not been attending to her pot of coffee, but it was now ready. She was grateful for the distraction, grateful to be active as Myka conceded, “Well, it makes you guilty,” and followed that up with, “but not in the worst way!”

“Imagine my relief,” Helena said. 

“Because you were trying to be good too. You didn’t reveal yourself to me.”

“What ethical paragons we both are.”

“The idea,” Myka said, speaking slowly again, “is that I wouldn’t have influenced your getting that library contract, because I thought I was in love with Rick, not with you.”

“Did you influence it?”

“Of course not. I mean, I have to confess: what I _wanted_ to do was commandeer the committee and force them to advise the city council not to give it to you.”

“That is the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me,” Helena told her. She turned away from the telephone again, coffee in hand. She imagined Myka standing behind her, holding coffee of her own, as if this were a nonparticular morning. “I didn’t want to bid on it, by the way,” Helena added. “It’s my employees’ fault.”

“Ditto on the most romantic,” Myka said. If her voice seemed to move closer, that was of course Helena’s hopeful imagination. But what a ridiculously dramatic heart-swell it caused. Myka went on, “And on the basis of that, I’d say we both need to get out more, but I’d really rather neither of us did.”

“That is also romantic, and if we were in the same space, I would show you how very much I would rather stay in.” Even in the early morning. Or: especially in the early morning. Helena considered the two of them in this kitchen, sharing space well or poorly, perhaps running into each other unintentionally… although this was quite a large space, so here any collisions would most likely be intentional. _On every available surface_, Myka had said—Helena remembered it distinctly—and kitchens had many, many surfaces. Helena closed her eyes, to prevent herself from looking at, from _considering_, those surfaces, and she cleared her throat. “However, we were speaking about your ‘idea.’ To recap: you feign a relapse.”

“Bloody, like before,” Myka enthused.

“Really? The blood too?” It wasn’t that Helena minded blood as such, but Myka’s production of it had been so _surprising_. And so _prodigious_.

“Don’t be squeamish. It’ll be fake blood, and it’ll be all over Abigail instead of you. I’ll be water-gunning it at her—I’d originally been planning to water-gun it at you, to make it even more like last time, but she talked me out of it. Helped me come up with a scenario that makes it pretty easy to get Jane to the hospital with us. So you should thank her.”

This at least did not seem to be Abigail in her “goading” persona. But it was also not, or did not seem to be, Abigail in her “protect Myka” persona either. Some hybrid of the two? “Bloody bloody Abigail Chow—she knows already? About this… idea, if that’s what we’re calling it?”

“I needed somebody to get me intel about whether the ‘act happy and productive’ part of my plan was working.”

“Intel,” Helena echoed, and she said it again, with even greater disbelief: “Intel.” And at that point, she did ask herself, _If this works, can you accept all of it? Can you in good faith maintain that this woman will not make you want to throw that book of koans, or perhaps that preposterously proposed pie, at her?_ She answered herself _No_, and then she said aloud, “I have never before in my life entertained the notion that I might not be able to refrain from throwing a pie at someone.”

“Then it’s about time. And I’m glad you chose me for that, too.”

“I didn’t say it was _you_ at whom I might not be able to refrain from throwing a pie.” If Myka wanted to engage in don’t-be-dense pedantry, Helena could certainly return fire.

“I think you need to listen really carefully again: karma, destiny, and I did not come up with all this just so you could go and throw pies at someone who isn’t me.”

“You and karma and destiny sound like a singing group.” That was too flippant. “I wouldn’t pre-apologize to anyone else for it.”

“That’s a little better.”

“I feel that I should pre-apologize to Jane Lattimer, however.”

“What for?”

That could not possibly have been a genuine question. “Perhaps for her having to witness a ridiculous play, whatever the outcome? Also, I should apologize in traditional after-the-fact fashion, for having set this entire thing in motion with my textbook.”

“Right, another thing I know. First, your textbook got her me, and she _loves_ me. Particularly, as Abigail confirms, happy and productive me, as opposed to fatigued and overworked me. So that’s point one for you.”

“Is there a point two?”

“Point two is that your textbook got her me, but it also got her you. And she loves you too.”

“She does?”

“_I_ got the intel on _that_.” 

Helena registered the _pride_ in Myka’s voice. At this _accomplishment_. Someone who sounded very like Charles whispered, deep in Helena’s cerebral cortex, _Helena, can you in good faith maintain?_ “Intel,” Helena repeated.

“Listen to me,” Myka said with some urgency, as if she really thought there were some danger Helena would not listen, “point three is that she’s outcome-driven above all else, and I told you, an initial circumstance plus time—plus time and, particularly for you, _accomplishment_—becomes a different circumstance. I know you haven’t interacted with her directly all that much, but she raves about your work, how smoothly the neighborhood project went, so the situation is, she wants to keep me, because I’m blameless and also productive, and she wants to keep you, because you’re effective and also professional, and she’ll want to find a way to do both those things at the same time.” Myka took a loud breath, which she no doubt needed. “Plus she’s all in on the library.”

“Well. It is a _library_.”

“It is. So what do you think _I_ think about it?”

Upon hearing that utterance, Helena became very aware that she and Myka would need to negotiate some ceiling on the number of times per conversation that Myka was allowed to drop her voice for effect. Given that the effect was so ridiculously assured, it seemed an unfair advantage. As if her discursive deck of cards had an extra ace.

And then Myka threw yet another ace onto the table: “I’d love to be showing you, right this minute.”

Helena choked out, “That the construction of a library can put that note in your voice…”

An entire _deck_ of aces, these played with another of those audible smiles: “There’s a reason for our being in love. With each other, no less.”

The proceedings did still seem to be shining. Despite their having spent only short, limited-in-number spans of time together. _Because of_ their having spent only those spans? “Wait,” Helena said. “In love. Why haven’t you and Rick met up?”

“When?”

“At any point while you were… re-falling in love with him.” It pained Helena to say it, nearly as much as it had pained her to hear Myka speak of it. Even as a façade.

“That’s a surprisingly good question,” Myka said, and Helena didn’t know whether to be pleased or offended by that “surprisingly.” “It hadn’t crossed my mind… because of course I’m not really, so why would I have?” (Pleased.) “Maybe I was worried because of how it ended before? Maybe the epistles were just so great, I didn’t want to spoil anything? Look, parts of this, we’re just going to have to _sell it_, okay?”

“Why do you think I can do any such thing? I really am a terrible actor, faux-engagement performances notwithstanding. Not that they convinced anyone in any case. Rick quickly discerned the reality. So did your mother.”

“You’re being so negative about this, _plus_ you’re reconstructing history. Rick needed a paramedic’s help, according to you, to get anywhere _near_ the reality, and I’m the one who told my mom the whole truth. But anyway, it doesn’t matter, because you’ll have some semi-pro backup: speaking of my mom, she’s going to come help, and she used to do community theater.”

“That’s… surprisingly unsurprising,” Helena said. “And speaking of not being surprised, or possibly amazed, so did Steve. Do community theater, that is. In fact that’s how he and his boyfriend met.”

“More help! Steve and his boyfriend, I mean! This is great!” Then her voice drooped a bit. “If they have time.”

Helena snorted. “‘If they have time.’ As if you didn’t know that anyone and everyone who knows you or me would find time—would buy _tickets!_—to see this ridiculous enactment of… whatever it is. And none of this is ‘great,’ by the way. This is hell, it has been for months, and yet you are proposing to _set it on fire_.”

“Isn’t hell always on fire?”

That was not a non sequitur, and Helena nodded a concession, despite Myka’s inability to see it. “I admit I didn’t think that through. But it certainly has the potential to make everything worse.”

Myka didn’t accuse her of being negative again, but she did begin to speak more slowly, using her _you are being dense_ voice. “Big conspiracies are way more believable than small ones, so the more people we have… plus it means you’ll have fewer lines. Can you at least convincingly say you love me? And don’t use that terrible American accent to try to throw me off, either.” 

“I love you? Is there much difference between English and American versions of that?”

“Either way, I didn’t find that persuasive, but instead of getting offended, I’m going to chalk it up to you needing practice. You’ll get some, and fortunately pretty soon, because I’m having everybody over to my place to make sure we’re all on the same page for the big show.”

“What? When?”

“Saturday. Rick said that he should be able to get the hospital staff to play along with my ‘relapse’ on Monday, so my mom’s flying in on Friday.”

“How long have you been planning this?”

“Would you believe me if I said ‘my whole life’?”

“No.”

“How about ‘since the elevator this afternoon’?”

“_Yesterday_ afternoon. We’re well into tomorrow. And also no.” But Helena did entertain a brief question-mark of possibility.

“Okay,” Myka said. “Since a few months ago. My heart jumped every time I saw your name on an email or a piece of paper, and I figured that meant we’d better get to work.”

“I love you,” Helena said, because it was the truth of the matter. She could most likely have chosen a more ideal moment to say the truth than while drinking coffee alone in her kitchen, not facing a telephone, but if she was not going to contrive to stand in a fountain quoting a koan while brandishing a lobster, then there was most likely no need to waste time on overinvestment in the particulars.

She was rewarded with, “That was better.” This time, Myka’s voice made Helena think not of extra aces, but rather of exactly why she was willing to go through whatever hell-intensifications Myka cared to set in motion. Then Myka, changing gears as she would, said, “I think you’re a method actor. Also, your brother.”

And back to the non sequiturs. “You think my brother is a method actor? Why would you think anything at all about—”

“No, I think your brother called me. Said you kept refusing to wreck my car, so I had to do something.”

“My brother.”

“Some guy who called himself Charles Wells, anyway, who claimed to have a sister named Helena who was for some reason acting weirdly out of character so she’d deserve me.”

“Oh god.” She added “avenge myself upon Charles in a way most painful to him” to the list of things that she would, in that ideal world of fountains et cetera, contrive to do.

“So you see why I think you can probably manage without the string section. In which he was _so_ invested. You two are really, really related.”

“He stopped haranguing me about you. It was terrible: I thought that he genuinely believed I should be able to reconcile myself to the… circumstance. That I would.”

“No, it was because I told him to quit making you feel bad about trying to be noble. That I was in fact cooking this up.”

“I’m sure he was over the moon.”

“Other than being totally disappointed that he hadn’t come up with it himself? Yeah. He does a kind of cute giggle-snicker thing when he’s pleased. You do it too—even though I haven’t heard it in a while—so maybe it’s genetic? I did have to talk him out of flying over to help.”

“I am astonished you were able to convince him otherwise.”

“Neither of us could figure out a good reason why your brother would show up with you when you came rushing to the hospital. Charles was convinced he could pull it off, but ‘he just happened to be visiting’ seemed too contrived to me.”

Helena was sure her imagination was incapable of projecting the full hamming horror of what Charles would have got up to. “_That_ seemed too contrived,” she said.

“You may not be aware of it, but you just giggle-snickered.”

“I did not.”

“To repeat: ‘You may not be aware of it, but.’”

“I am aware of wanting to be kissing you now.”

Myka made a giggle-snicker noise of her own. “To shut me up?”

“I suppose that would be an acceptable side benefit,” Helena said. 

“For future reference, I wouldn’t mind you shutting me up like that.”

“I know you well enough to know that depending on your mood, you might find some way to mind it.”

“Just for that, now I want to _try_ to find that way. To prove you _right_.”

“You are perverse.”

“You know you want to try to prove me wrong.”

Helena set her coffee cup down, simply so that she could raise her palms heavenward… a pointless gesture, in that it was perceived by neither Myka nor, most likely, any other celestial being. “Congratulations. I have now forgotten the difference between right and wrong. Speaking of ethics. Why do I feel as if this has been part of your plan all along?”

“The thing is, you actually do remember the difference. And so do I. And maybe, just maybe, the ridiculous place I work is starting to remember it too. Because I know one more thing that you don’t. And this is the _real_ intel.”

“Is it.” Helena braced herself, literally, against the counter.

“Seriously. Saving the best for last here: I saw a draft memo that I wasn’t supposed to see.”

Now Helena glanced upward, a _Really?_ eyeroll of which she was in this case glad Myka was not aware. “Skullduggery regarding memos. Excellent. Honestly, given your love of intel and other espionagery, I don’t see why you didn’t write me some clandestine ‘eyes only’ memo about all of this. One that would have self-destructed.”

“You didn’t want to hear my voice?”

After another look up, Helena told the truth. “I want to _bathe_ in your voice. But it reminds me of what I can’t have.”

“_Yet_. What you can’t have _yet_. By the way, Charles said to make you sweat about whether he’d told me about the achieving of a grail.”

“I certainly won’t sweat one drop over that. He would never have been able to refrain from telling you.”

“You two know each other really well, in addition to being really related. I don’t actually mind having been achieved, but we need to get you past this counterproductive renouncing idea.”

“Lancelot renounces the queen, not the Grail,” Helena grumbled.

“He said you’d say that. But I’d like to point out that you’re not in fact Lancelot—also, I’m pretty sure I’m not a bejeweled cup. Or a queen, so if you could maybe come up with a different story.”

“Charles came up with it in the first place, and haven’t you already found a different one? Aren’t I Cyrano?”

“I was just shorthanding. There’s got to be something better then both of those. Come on, you’re the one building a library.”

“Will that still be true, after Monday’s events?”

“It will. And here’s why.” Myka paused, clearly for effect. 

“The suspense,” Helena said. “What, oh what, will you reveal.” She suspected Myka was having more fun than she should, with her striptease of a plan, her “saving the best for last.”

“Funny you should put it that way. There’s going to be—wait for it!—a sunshine initiative. For which _we_ are going to be the poster children if we play all of my setup cards right.”

This woman, and cards, and the playing of them… “What?” Helena said.

“Because now the idea is that _disclosing_ conflicts of interest is maybe even better than _not having them_.”

“I hate to be repetitive, but: what?”

“The best I can figure is that the administration’s political opponents seem to be getting suspicious about the fact that there aren’t any. Conflicts, I mean. It all seems too perfect, particularly as a change from the old regime.”

“It is not too perfect.”

“Right. Exactly. But this is why _this_ is perfect: we’ve suddenly _realized_ there’s a conflict. Jane can go to the mayor and say ‘Look! Blameless adorable girls! Let’s shine the sun on them!’”

“Blameless adorable girls. Upon whom the sun will be shining.” Helena shook her head, then vocalized it: “I am shaking my head at you. Do you really think the circumstance is that different now?”

“I really think there’s only so long I can pretend to be happy.”

Helena refilled her cup. Perhaps it was the drinking of coffee that heightened feelings of guilt… Myka should not have had to pretend at all. “Then find another girl with whom to be adorable. And the sun can shine as it wishes on the truly blameless two of you, initiatives aside.”

“I’ll rephrase: I really think there’s only so long I can pace back and forth in my hallway before I get in my car and come try to explain this to you _yet again_, but in person this time. What do _you_ really think?”

“I think that your threat to explain in person is so tempting that I’m inclined to play extremely dumb,” Helena said, and Myka laughed. “But what I really think is that it all depends on every single thing falling correctly into place, including Jane Lattimer being magically persuaded to herself perform some persuasive magic. How likely is that?”

“I can’t believe _you_ just asked _me_ a question about the _likelihood_ of _events_, Ms. Textbook.”

And indeed, Helena thought, she _should_ have been brandishing a lobster while standing in a fountain. Or atop a model of one that would not be built. The _likelihood of events_. “Point taken, Ms. Helicobacter. I should have realized the paradoxical absurdity as the words were leaving my lips.”

“Oh, thanks a lot. That’s what I’ll be thinking about all day now.”

“Paradoxical absurdity?”

“Your lips. I really, really wish you’d been willing to be fast, there in that elevator.” And her tone teased, _As fast as you know I know you can be_.

“I don’t think that would have helped every single thing fall correctly into place.”

“Would’ve brought about an inevitable result, though. Anyway I’ll see you Saturday. I was going to call you tomorrow, or I guess I mean today, and tell you about all of this, but then the elevator, and I couldn’t sleep, and I _hoped_ that you… I was trying to be all self-assured about it, but you weren’t really asleep, were you?”

If Helena had thought herself charmed by Myka before—and of course she had been relentlessly charmed by Myka before—the idea that Myka would hope, with just that plaintive edge… Helena was lost. “Of course not,” she said. When she herself spoke low, what was the effect?

Initially, it seemed to make Myka businesslike: “Invite Steve, tell him and his sweetheart to show up about six fifteen. But _you_ get here at six.”

“Pardon?”

“Fifteen minutes, beautiful cheapskate.” Businesslike, but to a nonbusiness purpose. “Way more time than we’d have had in the elevator.”

“You said your mother would be there! And while I believe you now know at least some of what I’ll do when she isn’t watching, I assure you that I will absolutely not—”

“Fine,” Myka said, and now she was the one who was obviously rolling her eyes, “I’ll be on good behavior. I’ll just kiss you and kiss you and kiss you.”

“That’s good behavior?”

“Okay, maybe it’s not good _behavior_… maybe it’s just good.”

And Helena could not keep from envisioning being kissed and kissed and kissed, even for the proposed fifteen minutes, and she knew that it would be more than “just” good. She laughed at herself for knowing it, her laugh a small analog vibration of pleasure, one transformed into a digital electrical signal that traveled over its relaying frequency to Myka’s telephone, which translated it back into what Helena was sure Myka would hear, correctly, as pleasure.

All of that, in a fraction of a second, so why had Helena been surprised by what could happen in a day in a hospital? In a few noncontiguous hours of intimacy, pretended and real? “_Very_ good,” she agreed, because that too was true.

“For that,” Myka said, “but not only that,” and she continued, quite persuasively, “I love you too.”

TBC

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> original part 13 tumblr tags: numerically auspicious part!, but not really in other ways, I've always thought that the 'same river twice' observation sounds like a koan, I guess it's too straightforward, but it's still good to ponder, even though it's a misquotation from Heraclitus, he was very into logos and opposites and fire, I am very into writing things that allow me to deploy abstruse knowledge and research, not as cool as logos and opposites and fire, but then again what is?, my car was lately in the shop again, and that means more to me now than it used to, so who knows how I'll feel about fountains a year from now?, because violins and ballet and bats of all sorts have taken on the significance they have, you can't step in the same violin twice either, I am pretty sure
> 
> P.S. to this part: Those of you who know me at all most likely also know that I'm devoted to my wife. She was lately in a serious accident—from which she's predicted to recover fully, thank god, given the passage of time and hard work at physical therapy—but the upshot is that I'll probably be even slower in editing/posting/responding over here than usual, due to the fact that my role as caregiver is pretty all-encompassing at this point. This is why we make the vows, of course. And I can honestly say that I've never been so grateful that marriage equality is the law of the land in the U.S. than I have been for the last while, during my interactions with the health care system.


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Previously on Helicobacter, Myka was working on an idea. She told Helena about it in the wee small hours of the morning… sadly, over the phone. But they’ll be in the same physical space in this part, so who can say what will happen? Well, one thing that definitely will is that you’ll notice I haven’t cut and woven this part into a fully cohesive set piece. Everything was taking too long, so I decided to hone the little bits I had, take the hit, and move on.

That morning in her office, wishing she had not begun the day’s coffee consumption in the middle of the night, Helena found herself once again fatigued—yet the lack of sleep also rendered her energized, strung out on anticipation. She also found herself once again staring at those model trees, so valiant despite their small size. So valiant they had been, since the very beginning, and Helena envied them their ability to remain oblivious to the disaster that had befallen the model neighborhood they for so short a time called home.

Of course, the “plan” did not necessarily have to be the _full _catastrophe she was envisioning, for in the end, she and Myka could always swear that the (fictional) email-driven misunderstanding would remain that. No one in a position of power knew what had really happened. No one knew that anyone had said anything like “I love you” on the telephone in the middle of the night.

When she worked up her nerve, she asked Steve, “Do you and Liam have plans for Saturday night?” If he said yes, she could at least keep this… quiet. Somewhat quiet. A bit quiet.

Unfortunately, Steve said no.

“Would you like to participate in a disaster?” Helena asked next. “A _theatrical_ disaster.”

“Is that supposed to make me want to say yes or no?”

“I have no idea. However, it might be better for me to have allies, simply as a check on my worst impulses where a certain someone is concerned. I find myself agreeing to things… so perhaps you can pull me back from that ledge.”

“The fact that we’re talking about plans for Saturday night that involve a certain someone suggests to me that you’ve already agreed to something,” he said, but he was smiling rather than observably attempting to control his breathing.

“That, I regret to admit, is true.”

“Have you jumped off a ledge?”

“Not literally.”

“But only because she hasn’t asked you to.” Still smiling.

“I regret to admit as well that that is the only reason. It might solve some problems if she did ask and I did do it. In the literal sense.”

He said, with a beleaguered air, “I guess we’d better come, if only to tie a rope around your middle.”

“You _are_ the best assistant the world will ever know.”

“I try. Then again, so do you.”

“Not enough.” She looked at the model-piece. “We need to build more libraries.”

“That sounds like a ledge, or stepping off of one.”

“What does Liam like most?” she countered.

“Other than me? You’ll laugh.” In response to this, Helena again heard herself make the question-noise, which now would always remind her of Myka having recognized it. How that woman wormed her way into everything… Steve answered the now-Myka-reminiscent noise by saying, “Gardening.”

And Helena did laugh, as predicted. She’d expected the answer to be professional, such as “the law,” or perhaps something befitting Liam’s extraordinarily handsome looks, such as “Armani suits.” Then again, Myka was every bit as beautiful as Liam was handsome, and Myka loved books… Helena said, “Wouldn’t you build many, many greenhouses if you could? _Because_ you could?”

“They’re pretty objectively good, right? Like libraries. Maybe we _do_ need to build more of them.”

“I am not opposed. Find a project, or projects, and we’ll bid.”

“Really?”

“Of course,” she told him, with feeling.

“You’re not just saying that because I’m bringing rope on Saturday?”

“Everything is connected, my darling Steve.”

He chuckled. “With rope?”

“If necessary.”

“What is this really about?” he asked.

“I’ll let Myka tell you—it will please her enormously to go into detail.” Saying “Myka” aloud pleased Helena herself enormously. So rare a pleasure, lately. “Also I don’t understand any of the duplicitous particulars well enough to explain them to you. Sadly, I don’t have Greek, so I can’t read the epic poem in the original… plus, I haven’t slept.”

“I can tell… please don’t tell me why not.”

“Would that it were that.” She sighed. “My darling Steve. Am I ever going to feel in control again?”

“Have you ever? Really?”

“Comparatively.” She had certainly at some point _not_ experienced this career-off-a-cliff need to agree with every objectively ridiculous proposal of an irresistible, book-loving city planner…

“Do you want to? Feel that way again, I mean?”

“Yes?” Because she ought to want to.

“So cancel the Saturday plans.”

“I can’t.”

“Then no. You won’t ever.”

“Hence the need for the rope,” Helena agreed.

“I think I’m going to have to learn how to actually _do_ roping. Maybe not the tricks with the spinning, but enough to throw the loop around you.”

“I suspect your doing that would be met with great enthusiasm from a particular spectator.” So easy to picture the enthusiasm—the delight—on Myka’s face if she witnessed such a performance, but Helena tried to return to pessimism. “Not that I expect any of this to work out.”

“You know the real reason Liam and I’ll both be into this Saturday thing?” Helena shook her head, and Steve went on, “What always happens is that we’re at his place or my place, and we don’t have the energy to come up with any ideas about what to do, so we stay in. And then he complains that we never go anywhere.”

“So it’s because this comes prepackaged as an idea of what to do?”

“For him, that’s my bet. But for me, it’s because after he complains, he smiles at me. And I give thanks that I get to witness it. Myka’s got a pretty decent smile… I think you should have the opportunity to give that kind of thanks.”

From anyone else, such words might have cloyed. From Steve, they calmed. “The best _person_ the world will ever know,” Helena said, with certainty.

To which Steve replied an impish, “Ruth Bader Ginsburg.”

“I will concede that you may have peers. Six-fifteen.”

“I have six hundred and fifteen peers?”

“Myka wants you there at six-fifteen.” Her name, out loud, again…

“Do you really think this is going to be a disaster?”

“That question is, at this point, moot. I tried, but I have met my match.”

“In more ways than one, I guess,” Steve said, but he continued to smile.

That gave Helena leave to answer, “You guess correctly.”

****

At six in the evening on Saturday, Helena stood in her customary spot outside Myka’s door, her customary flowers in hand, second-guessing her decision to bring one extra-large bouquet rather than two this time. But then her thinking and deciding didn’t matter at all, for Myka opened the door and was _there_, a physical presence not in a City Hall elevator.

Myka didn’t let Helena hand her the flowers, didn’t even get them out of the way; she pulled Helena close and kissed her as if they were alone. A fussy part of Helena wanted to protect the poor bouquet, but that part was outvoted by every other part, bodily and otherwise, all of which were celebrating standing once again in this space, enveloped once again in these arms, being kissed—she kissed soft, Myka did. Belying the body-crush, her mouth was careful, solicitous. 

Helena eventually regarded the no-longer-impressive bouquet with a bit of disappointment. “Much as I enjoyed that, you might have let me set these down first.”

“You’re going to have _so many more_ chances to give me flowers, and I’ll give them to you all the time too, and floriculture will flourish around the world thanks to us.”

“‘Floriculture will flourish’? Are you drunk?”

“Not yet, you beautiful… hm. I was going to call you a cheapskate again, but those flowers look like they might have been expensive before somebody made a mess of them.” She raised her voice. “Mom! Helena brought you some pricey smashed flowers!”

Helena said to Jeannie, who wore an extremely smug (and, Helena had to admit, extremely justified) smirk as she approached, “In the interest of accuracy, Helena brought you and your daughter some flowers, which your daughter caused to be smashed. Cost notwithstanding.”

“I saw you participating,” Jeannie said. Helena supposed she could hardly have missed it.

Then, from the hallway—for Myka had neglected to close the door—Helena heard Abigail say, “That is an interesting euphemism for what they were doing.”

Myka shook a fist at her. “You weren’t supposed to get here before six-fifteen!”

Abigail, unmoved, said, “Like I didn’t know the reason for _that_.”

Apparently everyone had known the reason for that, and they had all wanted to see the six o’clock show: Rick and Varsha appeared behind Abigail, and Steve and Liam did too, making for a traffic jam not only of bodies but of introductions. Abigail enthused to Steve, of Liam, “He doesn’t disappoint!”

Liam said, “I’m… pleased?”

“I thought he was overselling your looks,” Abigail told Liam. “What with being in swoony love,” she added, and Steve blushed.

Myka said, into Helena’s ear, “Speaking of swoony love, it isn’t possible to oversell _you_. There aren’t enough words,” and when Helena tried to shush her, Myka kissed the ear she’d just whispered into.

Varsha, upon being introduced to Abigail, said, “Overjoyed to meet you. I was honestly beginning to think none of them knew any actual _people_.”

Abigail nodded. “It’s just me. Let’s do lunch or something. But only if you aren’t planning to, one, bid on a city contract, and two, fall in love with me, because there’s only so much of this kind of drama I feel like I can handle.”

“I can promise the first one,” Varsha said. “The second, that’s up to fate.”

Rick said, “Wait, what? Are you joking?”

“No,” Varsha said, in such a way as to make Helena wonder whether she _ever_ joked. 

To Rick, Abigail said, “You might need to class up your personal plating, Myka’s ex. I’m pretty charming.”

“Also not wallpaper,” Varsha added.

Myka said, “Confirm. She is not wallpaper. Can additionally confirm the charming point.”

“Should I be the one who’s concerned?” Helena asked. “You two are together most all day every day.”

Myka kissed her.

“Thank you for the reassurance,” Helena said.

“I didn’t do it to reassure you,” said Myka, and after smiling at Helena’s raised “then why” eyebrow, she said, “because I _can_,” and that was even better than reassurance.

Rick said to Myka, “You and I never got this far.”

“This far,” Myka repeated. “This far?”

“Rehearsal dinner.”

Myka squinted at him. “I really like that we can joke about this,” she said.

“Still too soon?”

Now Myka swatted him, her palm against his head. “In perpetuity, you ding-dong.”

_ Ding-dong _ ? Helena began laughing at how ridiculous such an utterance sounded, certainly from Myka’s mouth, and when Myka looked at her quizzically, she could offer only, “I’ve never heard anyone say that.”

Rick said, “You should’ve hung out with us in—what was it, fourth grade? Some entire school year, it was everybody calling everybody a ding-dong.”

This made Varsha bark a laugh as well. She said, “Oh my god, it’s worse yet also better when you say it.”

To Helena, Myka said, ‘I want to hear you laugh like that in perpetuity. And _you_ are not a ding-dong”—which set Helena off again, and Myka said, “Well, maybe you are,” but she softened it with a sweet nuzzle into Helena’s hair.

In fact throughout the entire evening, Helena found Myka to be physically demonstrative to an extent that was… new. Every time Myka neared Helena, her right arm extended toward Helena’s waist, her hips, eventually settling onto the concavity just where fixed ribs gave way to floating, there on the right side—there, or resting, higher but just as happy, in the middle of Helena’s back. These placements of her hand: Helena found them _correct_. Feeling the fit, the lock into place. Like sides of the bed.

All this prompted Helena to ask Myka, at a later point when, for a moment, they did not seem to be the center of anyone’s attention, “How much had you been holding back?”

“What do you mean?”

“Before. In contrast with all this _contact_ now, tonight,” Helena said.

“I told you I was going to kiss you and kiss you and kiss you.” And Myka proceeded to do that.

“I did think that was hyperbole. I’m not complaining, but you didn’t do this before.”

“Well, before. I didn’t want to make you uncomfortable. You were doing me a favor with the engagement. Several favors.”

“I _thought_ I was.”

“Am I making you uncomfortable now? I can stop.”

“Can you?” But Helena was teasing. “I haven’t seen you stop yourself from doing much of anything you want to do. Certainly not anything related to this evening.”

Myka shrugged. “I’m really committed to working toward certain goals.”

Helena regarded the relaxation of Myka’s posture, the playful smile on her lips, the glow of her gaze… and she was struck by, but couldn’t bear, the possibility of Myka being deprived of all this, of having to once again become the pale picture of irritated overwork she had been before. And this was no pretense of happiness, as Myka had said she’d been putting on as part of her _plan_; rather, this was the real thing: Myka happy, not holding back. Yet had they spent enough time together for Helena to be sure that that was so? “Is this how you _are_, with me?” Helena asked. “Is this how _we_ are?”

“I wouldn’t be bothering otherwise.”

Helena didn’t doubt it. “I’m sorry I haven’t worked as hard as you have. Toward those goals.”

“You can make it up to me later. Long game, you beautiful cheapskate.” 

“The bill will come due?” Helena asked, pretend-rueful.

“I certainly hope so.”

“I do too. But can you promise me that we will never have to engage in a performance this ridiculous again?”

Myka put on a show of considering, then said a simple “No.”

****

Scenes from a Rehearsal Dinner

*

Helena pulls Abigail aside to say, because she has not had a chance to say it, “I thought we weren’t doing this. I thought we were actively keeping her safe. No possibility of public shaming. I did try very hard to—”

“Except for the glasses incident.”

“That was a mistake, one that I, if no one else, made a sincere attempt not to compound. Why are you helping her in this? Why are you not physically preventing _me_ from helping her?”

“Didn’t she tell you her theory?” Abigail asks.

“Oh god, what now.”

“They’d never public-shame her over this, if they find out what she’s really been doing—and if she somehow gets in trouble for any part of it, they will definitely find out, because she’s planning to tell them the _entire story_, her idea being that it’s too insane.”

“That’s…” Helena begins, but she realizes she has nowhere sensical to go. “Well, that’s….”

Abigail nods. “Right? Because who’s going to call the org chart into a room and say ‘Here’s what you can’t ever do: put on a play about having your cancer recur so as to persuade your boss that you’ve fallen back in love with your ex-fiancé who it turns out is really a contractor who, if you can’t have her, you’ll waste away and die, but you would still like to keep your job, please and thank you.’”

“When you put it that way, I have no idea how anyone could _follow it_.”

“Exactly. In Myka’s own extremely special way, she’s brilliant… and as far as I can tell, the cancer—and you—really made her drill down on that.”

“Rick does say this isn’t how she behaved in the past,” Helena concedes. “But I’m beginning to think her newly revealed talents are being wasted in her chosen field.”

“Someday she’ll rule the world. And then, I don’t mean to alarm you, but I bet we’ll all be buckling our seat belts and hanging on for dear life. And enjoying it. I mean, look at you: you’re enjoying it right now.”

“‘Enjoying’ may be a shade too positive. In any case, you seem to have a part in the play too.”

“Point taken.” Abigail snickers. “I told her to buy grapefruit, and she asked me why. Never got around to breakfast after that glasses incident?”

“I did not punch her in the face.”

“You’ve said.”

“But I may yet punch _you_.” 

Abigail waves off this concern. “I’m _helping_. Also, I’m not wearing glasses. So punching me wouldn’t get you going at all.”

*

Several pizzas arrive. Myka asks Helena, “Did you know there’s such a thing as lobster pizza?”

Before Helena can answer, Rick says, “Why wouldn’t there be? Can’t you slap anything on a pizza crust?”

Abigail says, thoughtfully, “Then again, Myka’s ex, you may be my kind of chef.”

Varsha warns, “Mind yourself, not-wallpaper. I don’t want to have to cancel lunch.” She eyes the pizza boxes. “I also don’t want to have to engage in any avoidance behaviors.”

“No allergens,” Myka tells her. To Helena, she says, “Which means your dreams are safe, too.” Myka then busies herself handing out what she calls “the scenario”—several stapled-together pages of which Helena is as terrified as she ever has been of creatures that are large and have claws. She reads the first line: “First, there was a fountain.” She wishes she weren’t driving herself home after this extravaganza; she needs several stiff drinks. 

Myka says, “Okay, nobody’s got lines as such because I didn’t have time to learn all the medical terminology, and also I’m not sold on anybody’s ability to be off book by Monday.”

“I _love_ improv,” Liam says as he receives his pages.

“So do I!” Jeannie tells him, and they make exclamatory faces at each other.

Liam continues, “Ooh, can I be one of the doctors?”

Jeannie, for her part, sighs. “I suppose I’m relegated to being the mother.”

“_Relegated_?” Myka demands. “Mom!”

Helena mutters, “_How_ could this go wrong.”

“You’re such a pessimist,” Myka says.

“Why does that make you smile?”

Jeannie, for the moment embracing her relegation to the role of mother, says to Helena an indulgent, “Everything about you makes her smile.”

*

Myka beckons to Helena. “Come with me,” she says, leading her down the hallway, in the direction of the bedroom… raising Helena’s hopes for a brief, scandalized moment… but their destination is instead a different room, this one an office (with air a bit chilly at the moment but not stale; Myka must in fact spend time here) featuring a computer with a large monitor. “Dad’s actually really going to call in this time,” Myka says, “and if I’m trying to hold my phone screen steady he gets seasick. So this works better.”

And indeed, after not much time, there appears a slightly choppy video image of a some-days-bewhiskered older man sitting in the stern of a rowboat. He wears a fishing hat of an incongruous bright red. Whatever technology is enabling the call seems to be his only companion in the boat, yet he regards it as if it has appropriated the entire armrest between them on an airplane.

Myka begins, “Hi, Dad. Any luck?”

“Fishing is not a matter of luck,” her father says; this must be a customary exchange. “It’s skill.”

“Any skill?”

He answers a solemn, “Only on the part of the fish.”

Myka pulls Helena into view of the computer’s camera. She keeps her arm around Helena’s waist as she says, “Dad, this is Helena. Helena, this is my dad, Warren Bering.”

“Helena.” He nods. “Myka’s explained.”

“Has she?” Helena asks. “Fully?”

“How should I know?” he asks in turn, and Helena has to concede that this is a reasonable question.

“I’ll go grab Mom,” Myka announces.

“Wait—” Helena calls, but she is gone. And there Helena still is, expected to speak cogently to Myka’s father. Having recently thought about the time she spent in his daughter’s bedroom. She coughs and says, “I’m pleased to… semi-meet you.”

Myka’s father, who does not seem, based on this first semi-meeting, to be someone given to sentiment, nevertheless offers Helena a kind, if gruff, lifeline. “Semi-same. You want to go fishing?” he asks.

“Do you mean right now?”

He shrugs. “Get on a plane.”

“You have no idea how appealing that sounds.”

“Oh, I have some idea,” he says.

“And yet your wife and daughter would, I suspect, exact revenge on me if I failed to participate.”

“Get used to the feeling. Or leave the family.”

“These are my choices?”

“From where I sit.”

“You’re in a boat,” Helena observes.

“Well, or spend a lot of time fishing.”

“I don’t know how to fish.”

“Guess you’d better participate, then.”

“Or leave the family?”

“Myka hates how red her face gets when she cries,” he says. Factually. As he might state Myka’s age, or her eye color.

“You’re saying that the ‘leave the family’ option is off the table,” Helena tries.

“I’m saying that Myka hates how red her face gets when she cries.”

“You are a member of an overall very _strange_ family.”

He leans against the back of the boat; the change in posture makes him far less forbidding. “I heard your brother married some lady because she wrecked his car,” he says, with a little conjurer’s wave of his right hand.

“Touché,” Helena says.

*

Helena finds herself standing next to Rick. They are both watching and listening to Myka, who with great animation is detailing for Steve and Liam—and Abigail, but Helena knows that she already knows—the motivations of the characters in “the scenario”: “This is preposterous,” Helena says. “Does anyone honestly expect me to believe that this inclination—this _readiness_—to deceive is a new development in Myka’s character? It seems far too well-honed.”

Rick says, “She was always really really smart—especially in a get-things-done way—but I swear to you, if I’d known she was likely to turn into somebody like this, I probably wouldn’t have gone out with her in the first place.” He pauses to scratch his blond head. “Or maybe I wouldn’t ever have let her get away? I’m really not sure.”

“Well. Too late,” she tells him, and he bows that blond head in recognition.

He then says, “I need more food,” and wanders off, presumably to find some, mumbling words that sound like “lobster” and “pizza” and “I wish.”

*

Steve is telling Abigail, “I like your idea about not rerunning what happened before too exactly.” Myka has given her credit, in the written scenario, for this innovation. “I bet Helena likes it too—no blood on her this time.”

Abigail says, “We’re getting fake stuff that doesn’t stain. But also, history doesn’t _literally_ repeat. Or it shouldn’t.”

“It can’t,” Myka says. “Same river twice.”

Abigail comes back with, “Or, better, first time as tragedy, second time as farce.”

“Whatever you say, Marx,” Myka tells her.

Helena mutters, “More like the Marx _Brothers_ in this case.”

“In this case,” Abigail says, “which time is tragedy and which is farce? Genuine question for Myka. I mean the blood situation seems to support Marx’s version, but…”

“No times as tragedy,” Myka says firmly. “First time as TV hospital drama, second time as romantic comedy.”

“Not farce? Really?” Helena asks.

“Not unless the pies start flying,” Myka assures her.

Liam says, “I think that’s technically slapstick.”

Steve laughs and gives Liam a peck on the cheek. “I love you.”

“None of it oversold,” pronounces Abigail.

“You know, you’re right,” Helena says, for Myka chooses that moment to catch her eye and smile. And Helena gives thanks.

*

“I’m so happy,” Myka says to Helena, as if she’s been trying not to say it but can’t hold it in. Helena welcomes the words both as themselves, and as confirmation that her impression about pretense—or rather, its lack—had been correct. 

“Are you?” She doesn’t need to ask the question, but Myka seems to be multiplying her joy by speaking it aloud.

“I am. About all of it. This”—a kiss—“and also that everybody knows everything now.”

Helena feels compelled to state, “Not _everybody_. Not yet.”

“I just said I’m happy. Quit raining on my parade.”

“It is quite a parade. And yet Rick seems to be sleeping through it.” She points at Rick, who is on the sofa, head back, eyes closed, mouth open.

“Hey, mister!” Myka says at him, and his eyes snap open. “Nap on your own time.”

“This _is_ my own time,” Rick objects. But he says to Abigail, who happens to be beside him at that moment. “I think I did fall asleep during part of the briefing. Are they engaged in this version?”

“Not yet. The email proxy, remember?”

“Right. Sorry. I’m just tired. Long shifts. I’ll read the cheat sheet later.” He pulls a decorative pillow to him, clasps his arms around it, and closes his eyes again. Embroidered on the pillow is a fine-featured monkey, attired to assist an organ-grinder. If Rick were wearing a fez, their kinship would be unmistakable. As it is, Helena is left to wonder why Myka has a decorative pillow that depicts a fez-wearing monkey, why she herself has never noticed that fact before, and how Myka manages not only to say things Helena does not expect but also to decorate in that way too.

*

Helena feels a tap on her shoulder; she turns to see Jeannie. “Mm?” Helena asks. (She imagines both Charles _and_ Myka laughing at her for it.)

Jeannie sighs, with great ostentation. Then she points at Helena and says, “Words about destiny.”

“Mm,” Helena now says. “Myka told you. That much of it?” _Everybody knows a far greater portion of everything than I was aware_, she thinks.

“My daughter is a lovely person.”

“I… know?”

“But she is a talker.”

“Also known,” Helena says.

“And yet not with everyone. In fact with very few. It’s a sign.”

“Suspected, yet not entirely known. Very much appreciated, however.”

“Destiny,” Jeannie maintains.

“I don’t disagree. Also very much appreciated.”

Myka, carrying two full wine glasses, clearly in transit, bends her head to kiss Helena’s cheek. She says, “Told you it sounded more upbeat than fate,” kisses her once more, then moves on.

“Thank you,” Helena says to Jeannie.

“For?”

The entirety of this gift. “The unanticipated.”

*

Rick and Varsha are the last to leave, save Helena herself. She suspects Abigail and Steve and Liam, who departed together, are staging some sort of private afterparty of their own.

Jeannie hugs Rick. “Didn’t I tell you that you’d find a nice young lady?” she says.

“I don’t prefer to be thought of as nice,” Varsha informs her. She evades a hug, as if to prove her point.

“You’ve been perfectly nice to me,” Jeannie says, though with a tinge of thwarted-hug disappointment. “I asked if you’d mind if I ate the last piece of the pizza that had the artichoke hearts, and you said ‘not at all,’ even though we both liked that one best.”

“I did say that,” Varsha allows, but with a hostile witness’s displeasure that this overzealous prosecutor is using her past statements against her.

“So you’re nice under certain circumstances,” the prosecutor continues, and Myka nudges Helena and murmurs _what’s a circumstance_. “Are you nice to Rick?”

Rick hurries to say, “It’s all good, Mrs. B.”

Jeannie crosses her arms. “I didn’t ask you, mister.”

Helena doesn’t bother to hold back a laugh. “And just like that, you turn into Myka.”

“I’m her _mother_.”

Myka, for her part, doesn’t bother to hold back a snort: “Don’t even try acting like you’re proud of that, Mom. Somebody named you was complaining about being relegated.”

“In the _play_.”

“Also, you’re the one who got upset about not being called in to get all relegated the first time.”

“That was _real_.”

“Would you be happier if this were too? I could always knock back a shot or two of H. pylori.”

Helena says, “Do. Not. Tempt. Fate.” Myka gives her a comical stare, and Helena sighs and amends, “Destiny.” To Jeannie, she notes, “But I am not saying words about it.”

Varsha says, “Fate or no, I would be very interested in the case if she did knock back those shots.”

“I’m not sure what reading that gets on the ‘nice’ meter,” Jeannie says.

“Throws its calibration off completely,” Rick says. “It never works again.”

“I do like you,” Varsha tells him.

*

Jeannie says she will busy herself “collecting pizza boxes,” a euphemism for “ignoring the two infatuated women saying goodnight in the magic foyer.”

Myka’s conspiratorial whisper to Helena: “I’d ask you to stay, but my mother’s here.”

“Sneak out,” Helena whispers back.

“Who sneaks out of their own apartment?” Myka says this as part of a smile against Helena’s neck.

“You make me so strangely happy.”

A chuckle. “I’ll leave her a note. Still think it should say ‘be right back’? How fast are you feeling?”

“Happy,” Helena reaffirms. “But strangely so,” she adds, as well as, “Aren’t you glad you didn’t find a part for Charles in the play? Otherwise he’d be at my house, and what would we do then?”

“It’s like you never heard of this amazing invention called a hotel room. They’re incredibly romantic, plus you get clean towels every day if you don’t care about the environment.”

“You make it sound like a very judgmental place.”

“_Or_ you can hang up the ‘do not disturb’ sign and _save_ the environment.”

“I don’t think that’s technically what that sign is for.”

“You’re not very into mixed-use design, are you? Which is weird for an urban architect. But I’m not worried; I’ll meet Charles eventually. And in the meantime, he’s not here.”

“He is not.” And in any case Helena would throw him out into the street if it meant she could be alone with Myka…

“Don’t tell him I said this—because I want him to like me—but: good.”

****

When Helena opened her door to Myka this time, she did not need to ask “why are you here,” and she did not need to wish that Myka would push her way in: after only a breath of standing and looking, Helena pulled her, because she wanted to get Myka to the bedroom as fast as she could, not because either of them needed to _be_ fast, but to make sure that she was _there_, where Helena had feared she would never be, before anything happened to prevent it.

“If this doesn’t work,” Helena said, as Myka smiled at her haste, “and I don’t see how it could, so I should say _when_ this doesn’t work…”

“Then it’s your turn to dream something up. I know you can.” Myka stopped moving, which drew Helena to a halt too. “You will, won’t you?”

Myka’s voice held not doubt, not exactly, but somewhere within that light _won’t you_ Helena felt a vibration, a reed set humming by a breath of unease. “We’ll move to Maine and refuse to fish for lobsters,” she said, because she _would_ dream something up. Something, anything—because _nothing_ was more important than this. How could she have thought otherwise?

“From a fountain that doesn’t exist. Don’t forget that part.”

She _would_ dream something up. She took Myka’s hand, kissed it, and began to lead her once again. “I will never, ever forget that part.”

TBC

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> original part 14 tumblr tags (related to the fact that on initial posting, tumblr flagged me as explicit, which ???): while some characters in what I write do engage in adult behaviors, I wouldn't be embarrassed to show any of it to my mother, or to anybody else (well maybe a little embarrassed), (but I'm always a little embarrassed), (if you aren't at least a little embarrassed then in my opinion you haven't put enough of yourself into the work)


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